IMO, Media RSS is the best format, especially since it’s already used in video feeds from Google, YouTube, Yahoo and Microsoft. Flickr also uses Media RSS in their tag feeds.

FeedDemon has supported a subset of Media RSS for quite a while now, and NewsGator’s API recently started supporting it, too. Here’s a screenshot which shows how FeedDemon handles Media RSS in YouTube feeds:

http://www.bradsoft.com/typepad/post-img/youtube3.png

This is in addition to FeedDemon’s podcatching features, which sync enclosures with your iPod or WMP device.

http://googlereader.blogspot.com/2006/04/stay-tuned-its-video-in-google-reader.html

Mihai Parparita
Google Reader Engineer

The detour in the community began when a subset of the community yelled “$$ finish line $$” and pointed all attention in the newly forming ecosystem toward the Apple/IPod/ITunes deadend.

But that hasn’t stop me from writing my own media web app that works for me and I’m sure will work for others.

Check out my cast media browser “Cast Browser” @ http://www.castbrowser.com …. let me know what you think.

The design of my castbrowser is pretty simple … support all the xml media feed types (RSS, ATOM OPML, etc.) of the day and the new ones as they come along … and support the rendering of all feed embedded media objects right in the web page.

The web page is the only place I want to consume my media and I willing to bet the ranch even with the popularity of the IPod it is the place most today watch the “New Media evolution” and the place where the majority will particaipate in the “New Media Revolution” when the “Always On Web” gets here.

… and dude when you planning your next NYC party?

Why include one format when you can have three? Since rss is extendable, it would be nice if aggregators shared the same flexibility.

Speaking as a user here (mostly, though I do more than occasionally also design software), I consume media in a few different ways - and as of yet I have not found a single RSS reader (online or offline) that works for all of my needs - so instead I’m stuck with a bunch of only partially useful solutions.

- for audio content (i.e. podcasts) I want them to be organized, only downloaded ONCE, added to my media player in a logical manner (i.e. in separate playlists for each feed, with all of the metadata from the producer of the content preserved), and managed in a way that I can control from WITHIN the media player (i.e. I can rate them within a media tool and have something automagically happen to them later - such as having them deleted and removed from my media player)

- for video content - I typically watch this on my screen, I want my RSS reader to ALWAYS tell me when a feed contains multimedia content - even if it is an embedded YouTube video, ideally it wouldn’t require me to go to the original site but would allow me to play it from within the feed reader immediately (I’m also very much of the camp that I prefer FULL feeds - or at the very least would like to visually tell easily and quickly when a given item is NOT a full feed - currently more than half the time I do not realize that the feed is not complete since people use very different practices when publishing non-full feeds

- for text feeds though it is very tricky I want my RSS reader to preserve as much as possible the format of the original post. Furthermore, I want to ALWAYS be able to tell WHO published a given element (I’m not a huge fan of a “river of news” format because it can be very hard to keep track of which feed published which).

I want to be able to easily mark certain posts to be kept (possibly ever cached somewhere for me) and I would prefer that the feed reader have a good set of tools for keeping track of which posts I have actually read (Google Reader does this fairly well though I’m still mostly using Bloglines).

Of course I also would like all my various feed consuming tools to be able to talk with each other - even to the point of perhaps tracking feeds I have read/not read in a smart manner (for example I might want to have a tool that automatically fetches all my podcast subscriptions and adds them to my media player, while in another tool I see those SAME feeds but instead of redownloading the media content, I merely read the posts - best case being with some indication that I have already downloaded the media content.

For video content it might also be good to be able to set up channels of my favorites and watch them back to back - i.e. “I’d like to catch up on Rocketboom” or “Ask a Ninja” or “The ScobleShow” etc.

and finally, having just added a Mac to my mix along with my PC, I’m eagerly awaiting the day when I have a podcatcher than helps me keep the two machines in sync (this may take a lot as Apple restricts my mp3 player from being fully functional against multiple machines - I have an older shuffle). Bloglines or Google Reader are both valid approaches for cross-platform RSS reading - though they are by no means perfect.

Shannon

If you need more info than that, lets talk about it:

http://microformats.org/wiki/media-info