What does this line in my RSS feed mean?
by David Rowan
on
Mar 22, 2006 at 6:54:52 pm
I produce a video podcast. Each time I have a new episode I cut-and-paste an old and then update the info in it. This has been working well.
the enclosure line looks like this:
enclosure url="http://www.kutvfreshair.com/podcast/m4v/LBBI_DryPak.m4v" length="4518570" type="video/mov" /
(I took the little end carrots off because they made the line dissapear in the preview)
What does the information "LENGTH" refer to? There is a seperate line in the RSS for duration. If this is the duration how do I calculate it, since it is just a string of numbers, not a time notation? What am I supposed to put for the "LENGTH" and how do I get that information?
They are video podcasts based on our more popular features. Unlike other TV stations were not pulling them off-air but rather putting them together in an eding booth (FCP). I hope ya'll will check 'em oout.
Re: What does this line in my RSS feed mean? by Eric Bliss on Mar 23, 2006 at 10:51:00 pm
Sit, Grasshopper, and learn the Zen of RSS feeds...
Duration, as you already know, is the amount of time that your episode runs.
In an Enclosure tag, Length refers not to time, but to file size. The number you see is the number of bytes in the file. If you were to look at the properties of your file, specifically the actual file size (not the size on disk, if that's also listed), you would see that if you were to rip all of the commas out of it, it would look just like the number in the Length field of your podcast Enclosure tag. So, if you're making your enclosure tags by hand, that's what you want to fill in on the Length field - actual file size, without pretty formatting of the number - no commas, Ms, Ks, Gs, etc.
I believe the idea behind this field was to let people know just how big the file was before they tried to start downloading it, in case they have reasons to be concerned about bandwidth limitations - for instance, those poor souls still stuck on non-broadband connections.
