Friday the Yahoo! Search Blog had an entry which gives yet another cool use for RSS. Since I too am awaiting delivery of my new video iPod, I found it interesting on a couple of levels. In a nutshell, this technique builds a podcast subscription link from the results of video search on Yahoo! Search. iTunes can then use that link to populate your video library with the content. Yes, works with Windows iTunes too (see image below).
Here’s a quick step by step:
1. Go to the Yahoo blog to generate the RSS video URL.
2. Enter text in search box.
3. Copy URL to clipboard (e.g., Command-C)
4. Launch iTunes 6.x
5. Click Advanced Tab and then “Subscribe to Podcast”
6. Paste URL into this box (e.g., Command-V)
7. iTunes begins pulling in the video streams.
You can get more sophisticated (e.g., limiting video to QuickTime encodings) by consulting the Yahoo! Developer Network’s documentation for the Video Search API.
If you’re a Mac user, you can get an Applescript that does this work for you from Doug’s AppleScripts for iTunes.
Now wouldn’t it be nice if we could somehow build this sort of functionality into our OPAC? You do a search and one option is to get a URL that builds a subscription feed to that search? I’ll give that some thought and see if it’s possible.