Sheila McKinney

Scheduled RSS Feeds for Streaming Multimedia Sheila McKinney

Viewing video in the Internet can be troublesome. Once a link is clicked on, there inevitably follows a delay while the stream is being buffered. People often get tired of waiting and move on to something else. The introduction of broadband has alleviated this problem to some extent but there exists still a large body of Internet users who do not have access to broadband. This book outlines a solution to the problem of streaming media through the use of Rich Site Summary (RSS) technology. RSS is a web content syndication format, commonly used to organise news and the content of news-like sites, it is however, is not restricted to news items, indeed any information that can be broken down into 'discrete items' can be syndicated via RSS, for example lists, or weblogs. Once data about each element is established in an RSS format, an RSS-aware program, such as an aggregator, can check the feed frequently for changes and updates and act accordingly. This book describes the implementation of a system which utilises idle computer time (at night or during the day) to subscribe to media RSS channels in order to download audio and video content. Thus when the user arrives in the morning, there are fresh bits, news clips, a song of the day, whatever, provided by all kinds of content providers, from big TV networks like CNN and MSNBC, to a Dutch school where kids are taking a film class using inexpensive video recorders and iMacs. Here the benefits are that when a video link is now clicked, it starts playing immediately, because it is already on the local disk thus the wait is zero. The quality is limited only by the size of the local disk and not by the capacity of the connection.