With the explosive growth of podcasting, publishers are including more multimedia in their RSS feeds than ever. While the method of including media content in an RSS feed with enclosures is fairly well known, there are other methods available for including media content in RSS feeds, one of which is Media RSS.
Media RSS is an RSS module that was created to expand the way that multimedia content could be included in an RSS feed.
Originally authored by Yahoo! to improve media enclosures in RSS and also allow the submission of media content to its search engine via RSS, the development of Media RSS has since been opened up to the RSS community through the rss-media mailing list. Full disclosure: I'm also one of the people at Yahoo! who worked on the creation of Media RSS.
Before I go into how Media RSS works, I'll start by reviewing the standard ways of including multimedia content into RSS feeds, and then show you the advantage that Media RSS brings to the table.
With the current version of RSS, you can include media content as an enclosure. These were added in RSS 2.0 to allow publishers to include media files in their RSS feeds. This has the advantage of being supported by nearly all RSS aggregators, but you are restricted to adding only one media enclosure per <item>, and there are only two metadata fields: MIME type and file size. Here's an example of an RSS enclosure:
<enclosure url="http://www.webmonkey.com/monkeyrock.mpg" length="2471632" type="video/mpeg"/>
Alternatively, there is Media RSS. Media RSS takes the idea of adding multimedia content into an RSS feed and expands it by allowing publishers to include various bits of helpful information about the media files they are publishing. Because Media RSS is a module that extends the current RSS 2.0 spec, all the Media RSS fields are normally prefixed with "media:" to show they are part of Media RSS. For a quick overview of Media RSS, you can read Yahoo!'s Media RSS FAQ.
One of the immediate advantages of Media RSS is that it allows you to associate multiple pieces of media content with a single item in an RSS feed. For example, you can have an <item> linking to a blog entry about a specific day of your vacation in Rome, and then you can use Media RSS to include in the <item> several photos and a short video taken with your camera that day.
In addition, you can provide a lot more metadata about your media, including full time-coded transcripts, keywords and thumbnail images. Media RSS also supports linking to embedded players, which is great for those of you hosting your media content on sites like YouTube. There are also examples in the Media RSS specification showing how it can be used to link to Bittorrent files and Creative Commons-licensed media files.
next page»
