How can I extract the title and description of a TED.com video?

Question

I have a project that I need to add many many videos, some of which are TED.com videos. Is there an easy way I can perform an AJAX, JSON, or cURL request to obtain this information? This information does not seem to be in the embed object.

Answer 1

A way is load the html page with curl and get the data using DOM.

Answer 2

The site has an RSS feed that contains a lot of information, currently covering the last 112 lectures. For example, you could list direct links to the videos like this:

$url = 'http://feeds.feedburner.com/tedtalks_video';
$sxml = new SimpleXMLElement(file_get_contents($url));
foreach ($sxml->xpath('//item') as $item) {
    $video_link = $item->enclosure->attributes()->url;
    echo date('Y-m-d', strtotime($item->pubDate)) . '<br />'
       . $item->title . '<br />'
       . $item->description . '<br />'
       . '<a href="' . $video_link . '">' . $video_link . '</a><br />'
       . '------------------<br />';
}