We’ve recently made an important update to Plumi – we’ve changed the RSS2 implementation so that podcasting works in iTunes.

Podcasting has worked in Miro and other clients for a while, but iTunes has slightly different requirements. In short, the change to Plumi affects the RSS2 template.

The standard plone implementation is that the URL http://foo.com/bar/video.mp4 will show the object view of the video, while http://foo.com/bar/video.mp4/download will let you download the source file.

iTunes doesn’t like the /download on the end and doesn’t honour the MIME type – i _needs_ .mp4 or .mov on the end of the URI. Plumi already made the URI http://foo.com/bar/video.mp4 into the source download link. This change merely changes the RSS2 template to point to the .mp4 extension.

This change allows iTunes to pull in videos from the site. However, iTunes is limited in what formats it can play, so at this stage this only works for .mp4 and .mov files on OS X and other formats on Windows. iTunes has an in-program transcoding option, but be aware that it’s not particularly stable and has been known to crash iTunes (at least in the EngageMedia offices!).

The next stage is to implement server-side transcoding to mp4, which we’re looking at shortly.

As with all RSS feeds on the site, you can subscribe to a site-wide feed (such as this) or an individual user’s feed (like this).

Upgrading

Plumi site admins can update their plumi instance to plumi-0.2.x if they are using that branch, or can apply the diff as per this.