Adding video to RSS

Video is becoming more popular especially bloggers adding video to their posts. Many bloggers and video web publishers are realising that video in their posts are not appearing correctly in their RSS feeds.

Embed and Object

At the moment you are probably using the embed and object tags. This is fine for standard web pages but not for RSS readers. Some readers will be able to display your video but most will not.

Enclosure

At Newsniche we like to do things the correct way, so here it is. To add video to your feed you need to put it into an enclosure. An enclosure is an element of an item, that means your feed can have the element tag within the item tag. You can only have one enclosure for each item, which means one video per post. These are the rules.

The enclosure is only one line and has the following format.

<enclosure url="http://www.yourwebsite.com/yourvideofile.mpg" length="62256320" type="video/mpeg" />

You need to supply the URL of you video file, the size of the file in bytes and the MIME type. The first two variables are self explanatory, the third parameter will depend on the format of your video file.

Enclosure MIME types

Here are a few of the most popular video MIME type that you may need for your video.

video/mpeg (mpeg mpg mpe)

video/quicktime (qt mov)

video/x-msvideo (avi)

video/mp4-es (mp4)

video/x-ms-wmv (wmv)

video/x-shockwave-flash (swf)

You will need to place the enclosure tag within the item tags, this will replace the object/embed code within the RSS feed. You will still need the object/embed code for your website.

How your enclosure is rendered

Even though you have now added the correct code this is no guarantee of how the end user will see the video. Depending on which RSS reader the user has will depend on how the video is displayed.