Primordial Ooze

I just got done creating the infrastructure for a new video blog (vlog) feed. I thought I’d share how I did this.

I didn’t use any fancy blog software, like Movable Type or WordPress, even though I have access to these. I combined the social-bookmarking power of del.icio.us and enrichment and tracking capabilities of FeedBurner to do all of the magic.

I start by uploading a new video to my site and make sure the file is publicly accessible by setting the server permissions properly. I then use del.icio.us to create the feed. All I had to do was "bookmark" the url to the video and give it a specific tag. In this case I tagged the first video with oozevideo.

The standard RSS feed for the oozevideo tag is as follows:

http://del.icio.us/NickCody/oozevideo

However, that feed doesn't support the proper enclosure tags I need so a good video feed aggregator can automatically pull down the file. So, I added some special tags as follows:

http://del.icio.us/rss/NickCody/system:media:video+oozevideo

Notice the media detection type. I think there is a way to get audio enclosures as well as video, but I forget how. I can find out if you are interested. These special tags generate the proper feed with enclosure elements. Since I didn't want to expose the raw del.icio.us feed and since I wanted to leverage the statistics and tracking capabilities of FeedBurner, I wrapped the raw feed into a virtual one with the following url:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/delicious/nickcody/oozevideo

If you go to the FeedBurner site, it’s rediculously easy to wrap a feed. I can post an entry on some tips if anyone is interested.

You can use any old aggregator to subscribe to that feed such as Bloglines, NewsGator, FireFox, RSS Bandit, etc. You can then just click on the enclosure link (the video), and download the video yourself. However, I started using a really good video blog aggregator that works on Mac and Windows. It's called FireANT.

With this software, you arrange the feeds you're interested in into channels. The program automatically handles the complexities of downloading large videos and supports bittorrent out of the box. It then allows you to play them inside of the application. It’s very convenient and I think the experience rivals that of iTunes… for video anyway. I’m currently using FireANT 1.0b6. It’s a little buggy, but still enjoyable to use.

There are already 9 videos in the feed, all of which appeared in various episodes of Primordial Ooze. Most of thevideos are encoded with mp4, using QuickTime. I may settle on H.264 at some point or I may create a few format-specific feeds. For now, I just recommend that everyone who wants to watch t he videos on the feed install iTunes 5 (or later) which comes with QuickTime 7, which comes with the H.264 codec.

Let me know if you have any more ideas on how this can be used and/or feedback on formats or whatnot. Until then, enjoy!