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RSS and enclosures

Page history last edited by PBworks 16 years, 4 months ago

Rupert on using blip.tv for video hosting and Feedburner.com for your feeds:

 

This is an adaptation of a reply I gave to Schlomo when he found that iTunes was mysteriously not showing his latest episodes.  He had changed from manually entering his posts and links to video files, to copying & pasting the Blip player.  That caused problems, because it meant the wrong type of files were being created as enclosures. (flv files instead of mov files)

 

Enclosures are the thing in your feed that feed readers such as iTunes and Google Reader see and turn into a playable film.  You need enclosures to podcast effectively.  Feedburner creates your enclosures for you from information it finds within your post: namely links to video files.

 

If you have links to multiple files in your post, how does it choose which to make into your enclosure?

 

Feedburner will make an enclosure for the first video file it sees a link to, unless it sees a rel="enclosure" element in the link.

rel="enclosure"is a specific instruction to make that file into an enclosure

(in other words, your link looks like this: <a rel="enclosure" href="http:// etc. 

 

So if you just link to a mov file, it'll turn that into an enclosure that iTunes can see.

 

But if instead you paste into your post the Blip copy & paste embed code, that code contains two links to Flash files with rel="enclosure"s in the links. , so Feedburner sees it and turns the flv file into the only enclosure for that post, and so iTunes ignores it because it only wants mov or mp4 files.

 

However, if you *also* had a rel="enclosure" in your Quicktime mov link at the bottom, Feedburner *is* smart enough to prioritise the mov file over the flv file, because it knows that most people would rather their mov or mp4 or wmv files were created as enclosures than flv files.

 

So what you need to do is add a rel="enclosure" to your Quicktime link. Then Resync your feed totally (the nuclear option) in the Troubleshooting section of Feedburner and you'll be fine. It will prioritize your mov rel="enclosure" over the two flv rel="enclosure"s in the Blip player code. Though you could just delete those, just to be sure.

 

Then, if you have old posts that have the wrong type of enclosure, you need to contact Feedburner to ask them to reset your enclosures.  They don't do this when you resync.  Enclosures are created just one time, and associated with each specific post ID number, so once you've corrected your code, you need to ask them to manually remake the enclosures.

 

ALSO - another interesting note on the Blip embed code and ease of use:

Actually, there's something else you should be aware of. If you copy & paste your code immediately, before Blip's had time to do the Flash conversion, the Copy & Paste code that they give you links to the original file (Quicktime mov or whatever), with a rel="enclosure". This is what you have on Rabbits and Weddings, which is the only other mov file that's an enclosure in your feed.

 

But if you wait until the Flash conversion is done before copying & pasting, you get only the flv files in the Player code, with rel="enclosure" in the links, and that's what screws you up.

 

What Blip should really do is either get rid of the rel="enclosure" attached to flv files, which hardly anybody wants, or just STOP changing the copy & paste code after it's done conversions. It should keep the original file in the copy & paste code. It'd still play in a Flash player when clicked, because of a magic little script Blip puts in there that tells it to play the flv file if one is available. And it would stop you having to manually code a link to your mov file with a rel=enclosure.

 

Blip are going to change their crossposting & sharing soon, so this will hopefully change and these complicated instructions will become obsolete.

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