Stream the BP Live Feed via Silverlight
You can now watch the live feed from BP’s underwater robots as they try to plug the oil leak from Frank’s World.
How did I do this, you may ask? Did I send a little robot down to follow their robots around the sea floor?
As cool as it sounds, the answer is much, much simpler.
The other day, I noticed that BP’s live feed from the source of the oil spill was using a Windows Media stream.
A quick view-source on the page revealed the video source URL was:
http://mfile.akamai.com/97892/live/reflector:46245.asx?bkup=46260
I created a simple Silverlight project and inserted the following line of code:
1: <MediaElement Source="http://mfile.akamai.com/97892/live/reflector:46245.asx?bkup=46260" />
There you have it.
Unlike the WJLA live video feeds, the BP allows HTTP streaming. That’s why this works in Silverlight and I didn’t have to resort to using an XBAP like I did with the DC Traffic and Weather app.