Video feed reqs

Writing about video feeds I started to wonder what I would like to see in a feed. The most important thing for me is that I do not want to view feeds on the web, so it must be viewable in a Feed Client. And in my case that implies a local application, such as NetNewsWire (NNW), iTunes or Democracy. I use all three applications to view video. So which one is the best. And in addition there must be metadata present, which can be used by the user to judge the video and by clients to create extensive search possibilities.

NNW is not really a video client. Whether it is useful to view video's depends whether there is an embedded video in the feed, such as in the Google feed. In addition there is information the video title, the producer, video length, publishing date, a description. And there are links to the video for downloading, to the relevant web-page and to the feed-page. The video URL has a very hidden video type, so NNW does not recognise a video enclosure and the Download to iTunes button is left grey.

The iTunes video experience is very good. I only follow the AmandaAcrossAmerica video feed with this app. I like about this app that I can view the video's full screen. In the Items-pane some metadata is available. I can see the title, a description, the video length, a release date and the category. iTunes makes it easy to see which video's are unwatched, download video's, etc. There is also some cover art available. The metadata is not really used elsewehere in the app as far as I can see. It is impossible to access the feed URL and individual video URL's. Are they not available in the feed? In the newest version of iTunes one can no longer see the entire library. Apple decided to show only specific libraries, such as music, podcasts, tv-shows, etc. I do not like that they make that decision for me.

I use Democracy to follow ZeFrank and RocketBoom. The Items in the videocasts are downloaded automatically. And I can see which ones I have not viewed yet. In the Items-pane I can see the title, the description, the publishing date, the size in MB, a link to the page. The metadata is hardly used by the app itself. This application lacks some support for standard Mac-features, such as the ctrl and alt key. Also some standard Client features such as smart lists are missing. The good thing is that this app supports many video formats.

I guess that a video publisher should try to publish his content in various formats and with various metadata. And we hope that the best format/metadata combination will survive.

Categories/tags: MicroContent • type • video
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Here is a link to the video of the ZeFrank intro we made at the Seattle Running Fool get toether. It features a “scary” bellydancer. She was actually a lovely person. We had a chance to chat after all the excitement:

http://peoplegeek.wordpress.com/2007/01/08/running-fool-gets-lucky/

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