mpx Feed Adapters – Custom Feeds Just Got A Lot Easier
Not every video fits the norm. That’s why we’re often are asked to build custom feed formats, such as iTunes, Google, Bing, Boxee, QuickPlay, CSV, etc. Most of these are pretty close to one of our built-in formats, but different enough that they may not fit your requirements right out of the box. Up until now, that was a big problem for content providers, as they would either have to delay publishing their media until it could be configured for a Media RSS, Atom, or JSON feed or until a custom feed format could be made by our development team.
Our new Feed Adapters feature is something we hope will help you get your content out to the masses a lot quicker. It should make your video editors’ lives a lot easier, too.
Let’s take a look under the hood and see exactly how it works.
Feed Adapters allows users to use or create custom feed formats to meet almost any need. You can deliver a feed as a web page, or as CSV data, or in an enhanced feed format like Apple iTunes. This feature is fully integrated into the mpx console and works in tandem with the Feeds Service’s built-in sorting, querying, paging, and caching abilities.
Our Feed Adapter transforms the XML data from your video feed into any other format that can be generated using Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformation (XSLT). We chose to use XSLT instead of Groovy (or the like) because it’s easier to modify an existing feed. Writing a feed adapter is a pretty straightforward process but you’ll need a little XSLT knowledge in order to write your own.
Once a Feed Adapter has been created, you can configure any feed for use as a default output format by changing the feed’s Default Feed Format setting in mpx. You can also apply the ‘&form=’ query string parameter to a feed’s Public URL to view it in your specific custom format.
Transform Feeds on the Fly
So what’s changed? Up until now, if we wanted to add one of these formats, it had to go through our core development team. That step took time and limited the number of formats we could add. With that barrier removed, anyone can create an adapter to transform a feed into a new format on the fly.
Here’s an example of a sample feed adapter that takes our Player Dev Kit’s test feed and converts it into an HTML table:
Notice that the system returns the feed in an HTML page.
Just like with any normal feed, the response can be cached and contain very large data sets, and it supports all the normal feed parameters, like range, sorts, queries, templates, etc. You can also write a feed transform that uses parameters passed into the feed at run time.
Out of the Box Adapters Coming Soon
We currently don’t have any default or out of the box feed adapters available, but we plan to in the future. To help you get started, we have handful of samples available on the TRC.
To learn more about writing scripts for feed adapters and to view our sample scripts, see Creating a custom feed adapter. There’s more to come! Our next post will dive deeper into the technical details of constructing a feed adapter.
Questions, comments, or suggestions? Feel free to contact me or your Account Manager.
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