What I did over my Thanksgiving Vacation

By mkotschi in Tech

2 Comments

So last Tuesday I received a very interesting email from Roku, see it here.

Among the new channels available I found a few that were very interesting Pandora, Blip.tv, Revision3 all quite interesting and and worthy of adding.

But the new channel that really caught my interest was and is Mediafly.com

Here is what Wikipedia says about Mediafly:

Mediafly is a Chicago-based technology company founded by Carson Conant and Brett Mitchell in July, 2006.

Mediafly is an internet service for managing digital media shows (e.g. podcasts) and downloading them to many different devices, such as Sansa, Zune, and more. Downloading and Syncing is facilitated by Mediafly’s SyncClient software (also referred to as a podcatcher)

Mediafly also provides podcast search similar to that of Odeo or PodcastPickle with the addition of direct device integration and the ability to download/sync to many different devices and platforms.

Mediafly’s open API is in use by Chumby and other device companies to integrate podcast channels directly onto the device so that users can watch/listen to the same shows on their home stereo/TV as on their mobile device (e.g. iPhone)

Hmm…an on-line video and audio podcast aggregator, this could be very interesting.  At least that’s what I thought as I registered my Roku box with their service and opened an account.  Imagine my horror as I realized that everyone and theiir brother with a Roku box must be doing the same thig I was doing at that time.  There must have been smoke pouring out of Mediflys servers and their data pipes must have been glowing, because nothing was working right for the first day or so. The frustration quotient only really subsided on Saturday evening or so, the 28th.

Now at first glance Mediafly might not look like anything special, but they are, at least on the Roku platform anyway.  They do not produce content as Twit.tv or Revision3, they are more generic in nature and they have one killer feature.

That killer feature is the Add Your Rss Feeds link down at the bottom of every page:

Normally this wouldn’t be such a big deal, I use Googlereader eveyday and can add arbirary RSS feeds until the cows come home.  But that’s not the way it is on my set top Roku box.  This is the only way in for personalized media, everything else has been pre-chosen for you and you have only a limited menu.  Netflix, Amazon unbox, Major League Baseball wer up until recently the only choices for getting content to my box.  And admittedly they have a lot of stuff, but I constantly want stuff they don’t have.  I grew up on and still love those ancient Public Domain movies like Hercules vs The Moon Men, Gamera the Invincible or Cat-women of the Moon.  Now those and more bad really bad movies featuring “deep hurting” might very well be available for rental on Netflix, but why they are PD and already up on archive.org.  It’s just that I haven’t been able to access them with my Roku box, until now that is ;p

My earliest attempts at just loading a feed from archive.org failed for a number of reasons.

1. Mediafly servers being hammered like a six penny nail.

2. Clunky interface and a somewhat unhelpful Search feature.

3. Restrictions on what and how many episodes can be added to a “Channel”.

4. My own unfamiliarity with what the Roku box would actually accept as playable media. (Looks like Mp4s and nothing else.)

5. My own unfamiliarity with how important it is to have properly formatted and validating RSS Feeds to use with Mediafly.  http://feedvalidator.org/ is your friend.

Also it seems once an Item is added to a feed and Mediafly picks it up only an act of God or and Admin can remove even a deleted Item from their main index.  Which means if you don’t get your feed right the first time you’re gonna have to live with crufty Items in your Channel or nag an admin to remove it.

In the end, I now have my feeds validating and pointing to only mp4 files, THAT WORK!  And all seems to be right with the world.

Alright, for informational purposes here is what I did to get http://uhf.heymikey.org/?feed=podcast listed in my own private Video Channels on Mediafly.com.

There might be other ways to accomplish the same thing, but this is the way I did it.

What you will need :

1. Wordpress and this is critical.  You need your own installation of the software, getting an account from wordpress.com will not work, at least not reliably.  You add perfectly good media to your feed and wordpress dutifully wraps said media in <enclosure> tags in the feed, but Mediafly will or won’t read the enclosed media links properly.  You’ll know if you’re having this problem as the Item in the Feed shows up in your Show, but instead of a green “+’ button to Add It you get a ‘?’ and a message saying “This entry does not contain any audio or video.”  There doesn’t seem to be much technical documentation available to mere mortals so I was never able to figure out why only some of the media in my feed would show as playable.  In short you need your own installation of Wordpress, but that’s not all, read on.

2.  Blubrry PowerPress Podcast plugin this seems to be the magic that allows Mediafly.com to read media Items inside <enclosure> tags every time.  Maybe it has something to do with extra Itunes stuff that it includes in the feeds, I’m not sure.  But it works.

3. Apache2, MySql and PHP5, I run Debian Lenny on my server so installing the previously mentioned packages amounts to, aptitude install apache2 mysql-server-5.0 mysql-client-5.0 libapache2-mod-php5 php5-cli php5-common php5-cgi

As I said before you are going to need your own installation of Wordpress, so if you’re still with me I’m guessing you have the ability to get it all installed.

Once you have a working Wordpress installation and have installed and activated PowerPress go to the bottom left of the administrative interface and underneath the PowerPress logo click Settings.

1. Click on the Basic Settings tab and select  Simple in the Podcast Entry Box section.  This will allow PodPress to figure out the size and duration of your selected media automagically.

2. Skip Services & Statistics and Appearance (unless something looks funky in your chosen Wordpress theme).  You might have to go to Advanced mode at the bottom of the Appearance tab and change  Display Media Player to New Window Only in order to not screw up the layout of your WP theme.

3. Click on the Feeds tab and change the Feed Settings to Show the most recent (I entered 999 here).

4. Click on the iTunes tab change the iTunes Category to whatever you wish and enter your email in iTunes Email click Save Changes at the bottom of the page.

5. Go back to the Feeds tab and click on the validate link in the Podcast Channel Feeds, everything should validate since the feed is empty.  But you want to get into a habit of validating your feeds as this reduces wild goose chases.

Now we are going to add our first media Item to the feed.  Say you have a deep need to watch the shlock classic Cat-Women of the Moon through mediafly, this is what you do.

1. In the Wordpress admin panel click on Posts ->Add New.  A new Post opens up.

2. At the top of the Post give it a Title like “Cat-Women of the Moon”

3. Add some descriptive text in the text box below that.  “This is a classic b-Grade Sci-fi movie from 1953. Leonmard Maltin called it “the best of the So-Bad-it’s-Good movies”. Sometime shown in 3-d, always shown with a score by Elmer Bernstein, this picture is also known as “Rocket to the Moon”. A group of space travellers find themselves landing on a hostile moon inhabited by beautiful women in tight black costumes and heavy eye makeup.”

4. Locate the media link on the archive.org page, it looks like this http://www.archive.org/download/Cat_Women_of_the_Moon/CatWomenOfTheMoon_512kb.mp4. This is what you paste into the Media URL text box at the bottom of the new Post.  Click the Verify link to the right of the Media URL text box.  It looks like this checks the format of the URL you just entered, I believe it also checks to make sure the URL resolves.

5. Enter a new Category on the right, call it Media the click box.  Above that enter a new Tag call it SciFi and click Add to add the new tag.

6. At the top right click Publish.

7. Go back to the Feeds tab under PowerPress click the validate link.  If everything validates,  HURRAY!

THE BIG FINISH

Now move on to importing your feed to Mediafly.com

I am assuming that you have already created an account a Mediafly and have registered your Roku with them, if not you should go here first. Then