Musical Nirvana: Virgin Radio on Media Center! (and XBox 360?)

There was a heck of a lot of talk over the past week about how Virgin Radio (who I love) were now broadcasting to Wii and PS3 owners. Surely there had to be a way to get it working in Media Center?

I figured all I’d need to do is find the URL for their Wii/PS3 friendly flashplayer and set it up in Media Center. Since all three are designed to be used with a TV my theory was the player should work equally well on any of them.

20 minutes later, after much spoofing of both PS3 and Wii browser agents, I’d drawn a blank. No matter what I tried I always ended up with the regular, and somewhat un-TV friendly, web player that PC users get.

So I fired up my Wii, downloaded the latest Internet Channel and visited the Virgin website. Whereupon I realized the problem.

There is no Wii/PS3 specific player. Virgin’s regular player just happens to support the Wii and PS3. Bah!

So, how hard could it be to knock up a quick add-in for Media Center that supports Virgin Radio?

About eight hours hard.

Starting with a regular HTML page I created the four channel buttons and wrote the JavaScript/CSS needed for navigation via remote control. Then I added the code to play the audio streams via Media Center and to generally make the page exist nicely in the Media Center shell.

Yay, I had my working proof of concept! Since it was going so well I decided to get ambitious and embed the AJAX stream Virgin use to display images and song info in their regular web player. This was a bit tricky but thanks to Virgin’s excellent player most of the hard work was already done, my part was reduced mostly to trial and error.

After that it was just a case of messing around till I had a look I was happy with, and that seemed compact enough to fit on TV’s of different sizes.

I’ve been using my new player for about a day now and already I’m smitten. I have a lot of fond memories of listening to Virgin from when I lived in the UK and it’s great to be able to listen to the station from 5000 miles away on a TV.

Oh James just came on. Fucking A!

You can download the setup program here. It also includes options to setup XM Radio/Live-365 in Media Center, something I did a while ago to make that process a little easier.

I’d be really interested in knowing if this works using the XBox 360 as an extender. As it works on my Linksys extender I’d imagine it does…