I just subscribed to YouTube’s “Top Rated” video feed, and was pleasantly surprised to discover that it uses Media RSS extensions. Because of this, FeedDemon showed me thumbnails of every video, and clicking a thumbnail started playing the video on YouTube’s site.
I’m surprised that MediaRSS isn’t more widely-supported – I’m betting this will change over the next few months.
I too wish it was used more. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve read an article that talked about a video then had to go find that video.
I know there’s an orange button for everything and the kitchen sink too (RSS, RSS 2, XML, etc), but has there been any standard button/logo suggested to indicate a Media RSS feed versus a regular RSS feed? It doesn’t help Media RSS’s propogation when it is a “pleasant surprise” or has to be “discovered”. Yes, one could surmise from the content of YouTube that a feed might be Media RSS, but that is in no way a given.
While I understand the desire to know what a feed contains, I can’t say I like the idea of a separate icon for MRSS-enabled feeds. That strikes me as something that would confuse non-technical users, and I’m just not wild about adding another RSS icon now that we’re finally starting to settle on one :)
Just a pity they send the RSS files as ‘text/plain’… makes auto-discovery more complicated.
To make things worse, it took me a minute to figure out I had to click the orange RSS button to get to a page which lists various feeds – I thought that was a direct link to a feed, the URL that showed in the status bar was a bit weird. I was trying to find the specific link Nick mentioned, and I couldn’t find one on the ‘top rated’ page…
Nick, I hope not to be OT on this comment, since it is related to FeedDemon, but I would like to ask you wich style have you got configured on the screen capture from your post?
Thanks,
That’s Surfer – the default in FD2.
Hey Nick, I just started using your software a month ago, having never used RSS before, and love it. It’s freaking sweet that FD also supports MediaRSS. I’m going to start subscribing to media feeds today. Thanks!
Thanks, Andrew :)
Thats odd, I’m using that style, but I don’t see the thumbnails at the top.
Paul, try moving the feed to a folder that isn’t synched.
Ah yes, its working now. That is cool! Thanks Nick.