Over the past week and a half, I've been fixing bugs in the implementation of newsgroups support in RSS Bandit. Yesterday I celebrated getting the last major networking issue being fixed by posting a somewhat empty message to the microsoft.public.xml newsgroup from RSS Bandit. The main thrust of what's left is for Torsten and I to decide how we want newsgroups to be exposed in the user interface.

It is time to start thinking about another item on the roadmap for our next release. This time I want to focus on what we'll do to better support RSS enclosures and podcasting. If you are unfamiliar with either of these concepts, you should read Dave Winer's blog post Payloads for RSS from 2001 which describes the concept of subscribing to digital media content such as songs and videos as opposed to just text as is common today.  

Although I am not interested in any of the amateur talk radio or audioblogging that is typically associated with podcasting I still think this is a very interesting development that should be supported by RSS Bandit. I would love to be able to subscribe to the G-Unit website and get new songs that have been released to the public or subscribe to the various XBox 360 rumor mills to get new videos of game demos.

Below is a list of features I'd like to see in RSS Bandit.

  1. Ability to download RSS enclosures to a folder of my chosing. This folder can be configured per feed so I can have some stuff go to C:\G-Unit and other stuff go to C:\XBox360.
  2. A list of files currently being downloaded or that have been downloaded.
  3. A download meter to indicate how much of a file has been downloaded.
  4. Ability to add files to my Windows Media Player or iTunes playlist of my choosing on successful download. The level of configurability of this feature will depend on how much work is entailed. :)

If you have any ideas that I have left out or comments about the above list, just go ahead and reply to this post.


 

Categories: RSS Bandit
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Friday, 27 May 2005 17:10:43 (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
I'd like to configure RSSBandit to not automatically download certain feeds, as I may or may not listen to these on-demand. I'd hate to waste bandwidth.

Also, if you have a few minutes, could you take a look at my thoughts on the whole topic here...

http://www.cerkit.com/cerkitBlog/SearchView.aspx?q=podcast

Specifically,

"Why "podcasting" with RSS+Enclosures is a bad idea"

and

"Podcasting is not accessible"

Some of this content came directly from the original conversations about RSS+Enclosures in the GotDotNet discussions back before Dave and Adam got "famous" (again).

Great work on RSSBandit!
Friday, 27 May 2005 17:31:56 (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
The default behavior will be NOT to download enclosures. You'll have to explicitly turn on this feature.

I read your posts. The "Why "podcasting" with RSS+Enclosures is a bad idea" seems to be complaining about security and learning the lessons from email attachments. I plan to keep these lessons in mind while working on this feature for RSS Bandit. The "Podcasting is not accessible" is interesting but doesn't seem terribly relevant to this discussion. All visual media are inherrently inaccessible to the vision impaired as is all audio media to the hearing impaired. This doesn't mean we shouldn't have audio or video on the Web. Should iTunes pack up because the hearing impaired can't listen to music? How about video game consoles, should they be abandoned because the vision impaired cannot enjoy them?
Friday, 27 May 2005 18:27:43 (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
FYI, adding files to WMP is fairly simple. You can set WMP to monitor folders, and have a custom search folder that picks those up and adds them to a specific playlist automatically. This is how I do it now!
Friday, 27 May 2005 19:22:36 (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
Confession: I tried RSS Bandit a long time ago, currently I use a commercial reader.

It seems you are proposing something like a multi-media RSS Tivo. So while your concepts 1 to 4 look great, the general idea seems the best to me. Why not provide feed content recording with journal content and all enclosures? The approach should be as uniform as possible, even if only audio or part of the enclosure types get implemented first. What does this imply on the user interface?

I know it implies that I could sync my portable multimedia device (or PDA or tablet) on the net, then take it with me. Someday this might be the multimedia device in the car, picking up stuff through WiFi as it sits in the garage. This will be great until the commercials start coming down the channel!
Friday, 27 May 2005 20:12:46 (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
* Security, do not allow downloading unsafe files
* Ability to turn download on/off per feed/category/global
* Ability to spesify a directory (E:\Donwloads\) and have each feed's download in a sub-directory (E:\Donwloads\XBox360, E:\Donwloads\Joel, etc) /without/ having to define it for each and every feed.
Saturday, 28 May 2005 02:18:25 (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
How easy/difficult would be to resume downloads from where it had stopped,
Kannan
Monday, 30 May 2005 22:18:43 (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
Personally, I'm looking forward to see how the WMP integration is done. In particular, the ability to view a video in another Bandit window or enqueue it in the play list of the main WMP. It's rude when a downloads manager does not provide an enqueue for digital media content (I'm talking to you Firefox!).

Other items:
-Automatic management of the downloads footprint
e.g. Rolling list of enclosures where only the last 10 are retained, but the ability to toggle a retain flag.
-Provide a media controls toolbar in the reading window
-New terminology?
-Media files are not read
-Thumbnailing videos (Channel9 is great at this)

Keep up the great work on Bandit!
-Sean










Sean Woodward
Tuesday, 31 May 2005 04:13:09 (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
Other additions:<br /> - the ability to "mark read/unread" (i.e. don't/do download) individual enclosures or posts in a feed.<br /> - "catch-up" ability, so I don't necessarily download all the outstanding enclosures when I subscribe to a podcast-type feed.<br /> - a way to expire old downloads, either count based ("keep the last 10") or time based ("delete anything older than a week").<br /><br />
Andy L.
Wednesday, 01 June 2005 13:59:30 (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
You've probably already thought of this but what about security? What about virus, enclosed scripts or malicious data? Presumably, things should be scanned by virus checker or??
karl
Comments are closed.