Re: Atom feed design for a variety of media types

[Peter Keane]

On Mon, 14 Jan 2008, James M Snell wrote:

I had been involved in some discussions a while back geared towards working 
on a standard set of media extensions derived from the itunes and yahoo media 
extensions.  Unfortunately, that work never progressed.  Such work would 
certainly not be unwelcome.

- James

Absolutely.  It would be a huge boon for the sort of work we are trying to 
do. MIT's OpenCourseWare, ITunes U, etc. are all the rage.  A Media-rich 
Atom standard would be a no-brainer for that area (and with FeedSync or a 
FeedSync-type standard along with it, a very powerful platform indeed).

Any thoughts on how such a process might be re-booted?

-peter



Peter Keane wrote:

[snip]
This is the same use case I am facing (digital
image/video/audio/document library to be used in higher ed.). And
figuring out metadata for multiple media entities is the last piece of
the puzzle for using Atom.  I had gone with a custom "microformat" xhtml
to be included in the content for the media but encoding metadata using
classes was getting kludgy.  So...does this seem like a reasonable
approach:

<link rel="http://example.com/thumbnail"; 
href="http://example.com/media/123_100.jpg"; type="image/jpeg"
length="3452">
  <x:height>120</x:height>
  <x:width>120</x:width>
</link>

<link rel="enclosure" href="http/example.com/media/123.mov"
type="video/quicktime" length="3434343">
  <x:duration>123</x:duration>
  <x:bitrate>128</x:bitrate>
  <x:checksum>e18d8047a12bac8274e018dc70cb7d39</x:checksum>
</link>

<link rel="enclosure" href="http/example.com/media/123.mp3"
type="audio/mpeg" length="34343">
  <x:duration>123</x:duration>
  <x:bitrate>128</x:bitrate>
  <x:channel_mode>stereo<x:channel_mode>
  <x:checksum>2e6e63a97c1cbcd4741489849f7e4ab8</x:checksum>
</link>

This, too, is for a custom application (I am the consumer and publisher) 
but potential for reuse and the desire to create a sane design are highly 
desired.  (I, too, need to attend a James Snell session on creating atom 
extensions!).

-peter keane

daseproject.org