Official Google Reader Blog - News, Tips and Tricks from the Reader team

Stay tuned ... it's video in Google Reader

4/28/2006 09:02:00 AM
Posted by Chris Wethrell, Software Engineer

In our never-ending quest to help you waste your day in better and richer ways, we've added support for video feeds that have Flash players. Mainly, this means you can watch videos from Google Video or YouTube directly in Reader. Here's a few feeds that work well:

Oh, the hours you can waste!

Fun for publishers: If you have a site that publishes videos as Flash files, then you can add support for your site in Google Reader by adding an enclosure to each appropriate item in either your RSS or Atom feed like the following:

<enclosure url="http://example/example-flash-video-player.swf" type="application/x-shockwave-flash"/> (for RSS feeds)
or
<link rel="enclosure" href="http://example/example-flash-video-player.swf" type="application/x-shockwave-flash"/> (for Atom feeds)

As we've mentioned before our plan is to add support for the Media RSS extension as well, but we had the enclosure support ready today and wanted to let interested publishers play around with it.

Happy watching!