The spread of XSPF
XSPF is an example of one of those standards that’s been bubbling up from under for a whle now - and is beginning to take it’s righteous place in teh forfront of grass roots standards.
XSPF is a format for playlists. It was created by Lucas Gonze and the community that surrounds a service called WebJay.org - which is a playlist sharing site.
MU3 (from the Winamp folks) was great - but it isn’t state-of-the-art with all the features, fields and capabilites demanded from the marketplace today. XSPF solves that challenge.
I’ve asked Lucas if we couldn’t extend XSPF to become a playlist format for lists of videos or slide shows. It’s seems that these sort of collection/ordered list thingies should all be the same kind of advanced EDL thingie.
But for now - it’s great to see a Wordpress plug-in for XSPF.
October 10th, 2005 at 1:30 am
This is interesting - I had an intern working on developing a social app that lets users remix TV shows into custom playlists…we used a combination of M3U and VLC for playback, but a more elegant solution woulda been great to use…we’d love to volunteer our work for any efforts to create a general purpose media playlist format.
October 10th, 2005 at 4:49 pm
Thanks for the shout-out, Marc!
Imran: letting users remix TV shows into custom playlists is exactly the kind of thing we’re trying to enable here. Your users can use Yahoo Music Engine to view video playlists, or they can install the XSPF plugin for Winamp (at http://plext.blogspot.com/) and view their playlists in Winamp. As an alternative you can do some trivial XSLT to convert XSPF to any proprietary playlist format, and we have templates for those transforms already.
There are a ton of little things you can do to help improve the situation — email me or post to http://lists.musicbrainz.org/mailman/listinfo/playlist if you’re interested.
October 10th, 2005 at 4:50 pm
Thanks for the shout-out, Marc!
Imran: letting users remix TV shows into custom playlists is exactly the kind of thing we’re trying to enable here. Your users can use Yahoo Music Engine to view video playlists, or they can install the XSPF plugin for Winamp (at http://plext.blogspot.com/) and view their playlists in Winamp. As an alternative you can do some trivial XSLT to convert XSPF to any proprietary playlist format, and we have templates for those transforms already.
There are a ton of little things you can do to help improve the situation — email me or post to http://lists.musicbrainz.org/mailman/listinfo/playlist if you’re interested.