Yahoo has presented a rationale for people debating on purchasing a video iPod – a way to fill it with video content.
Andy Volk, Yahoo Video Search product manager, had to demonstrate a need for a video iPod “for research purposes only” to his boss. Fortunately, pottering around the search labs at Yahoo offers one a whole bunch of options on the video side.
Since I wanted to fill my new gadget as quickly as possible with video files found with Yahoo! Video Search, I realized that this would be a good time to mention that you can use the Media RSS feed from our Web Services API to easily pull in Yahoo! Video Search results as a video podcast with iTunes 6, and from there you can move them to your iPod. (So you can still use this feature with iTunes 6 even if your Video iPod hasn’t arrived yet).
Volk goes through the steps needed to create a Media RSS feed, and helpfully provides a search box to get things started in his post. In a clever bit of programming, the RSS feed URL appears under the search box as a user types in the search term.
Then, it’s just a matter of copying the feed URL to the clipboard, and going to iTunes 6. Under the ‘Advanced’ menu, select ‘Subscribe to Podcast’, and paste in the feed URL created. From there, iTunes 6 will begin downloading video files based on the query terms.
Volk also mentions how advanced users can use the Yahoo! Video Search Web Services API to customize search results, like limiting them to only certain file formats. Also, Volk writes Yahoo has done some of the work for users looking for video search feeds already, via Yahoo Video Search:
We already feature these feeds as autodiscoverable RSS feeds in Yahoo! Video Search result pages (those of you with Yahoo! Toolbar or Firefox may have noticed this already), so if you have an RSS aggregator that supports Media RSS and/or RSS enclosures, you can use these feeds to automatically download the top video search results for your query as well!
David Utter is a staff writer for murdok covering technology and business. Email him here.
