Setting up RSS Input Feeds

yospaceCDS can take a source MRSS feed and ingest content items it discovers into one or many Content Groups.

You can ingest from:

  • Standard MRSS Feeds
  • MRSS Feeds with additional tags in tags defined in separate namespaces
  • Brightcove Media API JSON feeds

Important: Regardless of the type of feed you are ingesting from, the feed must contain the URL references to the actual video data.  Standard RSS feeds contain only references to the web page on which the video is embedded and therefore not appropriate to use.

Video Tutorial

A Video Tutorial is available.

Basic Set-up

To set up a new RSS Input Feed, you need to configure the following settings:

Name
A short descriptive name that you will use to identify the RSS Input Feed in the summary screen
Description
Any additional information you want to associate with the RSS Input Feed. For your information purposes only.
Feed Type
Choose the type of feed you are ingesting from.
Usage Profile
If your account is set-up to use Usage Profile, a drop-down menu will appear allowing you to select the Usage Profile under which the content will be ingested.
Put Into
Select a Content Group into which the Input Feed will place content. The Input Feed can feed into multiple groups, simply hold the CTRL (PCs) or CMD (Mac) key while clicking multiple items in the list selector.
Source URL
The URL of the MRSS Feed. The URL can contain a username and password to specify URLs behind HTTP authentication. The syntax you should use is http://username:password@host/path
Update Every
The frequency by which yospaceCDS will poll the source URL for updates. The minimum value for this setting is 5 minutes.
Publish Date Handling
Select this option is you want yospaceCDS to ignore the date specified by the item's pubDate and use the current date and time at which the item was ingested.
Remove Content
Allows you to define when content is removed from the Content Groups into which the Input Feeds supplies Media Items. When a Media Item is removed from a Content Group, it is not deleted from yospaceCDS immediately, allowing clients that have cached a URL to an item of content to continue to access that content for 5 days after its removal from the published feed.
Quality
The quality setting relates to encoding policy for mobile delivery. You can use from Standard or High Quality. Selecting High Quality requires more processing time when ingesting content, but will a deliver higher quality video on Smartphone devices.
State
Choose from Active or Inactive. Note that Inactive feeds do not poll the source URL.

Advanced Options

Content Adjustment Settings

You can apply a variety of adjustments to the content on ingest. See our article describing these settings for more information.

Metadata Mappings

You can define a mapping from a tag in the source MRSS feed to a field in your metadata schema.

To define a mapping:

  • Click the Add Item Level Field link. A drop-down menu will appear showing the available fields in your metadata schema.
  • Choose the field that you wish to be populated by this mapping.
  • Type the name of the tag you wish to populate this field in the column labelled Populated From. To define a tag with a namespace use the syntax namespace:tag.
  • Click the Re-ingest checkbox if you want the content to be re-ingested in the event that this tag should change value in the original feed.

Monitoring

It is possible to set-up feed monitoring so that you are informed by email in the event a problem should develop with your feed. If there is a problem, yospaceCDS will send an email detailing the nature of the issue. An example is provided here so that you can set-up mail forwarding rules according to your requirements based on its content or envelope details: 

From: yospaceCDS Feed Monitor <do-not-reply@yospace.com>
To: <You>



*** THIS IS AN AUTOMATED MESSAGE - PLEASE DO NOT REPLY ***

This is an email to update you on an Input Feed within your 
yospaceCDS account.

Feed Name:    Today's Headlines
Source URL:   http://www.myserver.com/mrss?feed=349834
Feed ID:      34134467

The system has generated this update because:

Your feed could not be retrieved from the URL you specified.  The 
details are: Server returned HTTP response code: 503 for URL: 
http://www.myserver.com/mrss?feed=349834

If you would like not to receive these updates in future, please 
log in to your yospaceCDS account and remove your email from the 
Input Feed concerned.

You can log in to your yospaceCDS account at: 
http://cds1.yospace.com/cmui

If you have concerns about your Input Feed that you want to raise 
with Yospace, email support@yospace.com

To enable monitoring:

  • Click the Enable Montoring checkbox
  • If you want yospaceCDS notify you if the feed has not received content for a certain period of time, enter the number of hours into the Warn After field.
  • Enter a list of email addresses you want to receive the notification messages. The list should be space or comma seperated.

A Quick Guide to MRSS

If you're new to MRSS, we recommend that you read the specification, which is available at:

As a quick start, here is an example MRSS feed with two items:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?>
<rss version="2.0" xmlns:media="http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/" >
  <channel>
    <title>Example MRSS</title>
    <description>An example MRSS feed</description>
    <item>
      <title>Dog balancing biscuit on nose</title>
      <link>http://www.yospace.com/dogbiscuit.html</link>
      <description></description>
      <guid>UA-2152413-1</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue Mar 23 17:22:22 GMT 2010</pubDate> 
      <media:content url="http://yospace.com/dog.mpg" />
    </item> 

    <item>
      <title>Cat balancing biscuit on nose</title>
      <link>http://www.yospace.com/catbiscuit.html</link>
      <description></description>
      <guid>UA-2342923-2</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue Mar 23 17:22:22 GMT 2010</pubDate> 
      <media:content url="http://yospace.com/cat.mpg" />
    </item> 
  </channel>
</rss>

Notes on important fields:

link
This is the URL of the associated article, not the actual media file.
description
This must be a unique ID of the item; if you specify another item with the same GUID in the future, it will be ignored.
pubDate
The date of when the item is actually published.  This is important if you ask yospaceCDS to sort output feeds by  pubDate.  If you do not specify a pubDate, or you select to override the Publish Date in the RSS Set-up, the date of ingestion is used instead.  pubDate must follow the date and time specification of RFC 822, with exception that years can be expressed as either 2 or 4 characters.
media:content
Defines the location of the actual media binary file. Obviously this URL needs to be internet accessible, or if not, must allow the yospaceCDS IP address (91.213.199.249) to access it.

Geo-Fencing

It is possible to restrict access to titles based on geography.  To do this, the standard RSS tag <media:restriction> is used.  The restriction can be defined as a whitelist or a blacklist.  A whitelist defines the list of countries that you want to allow which has the effect of denying all countries not on the list.  A blacklist defines countries you want to deny, which means that any country not on the blacklist is allowed.

<media:restriction relationship="allow|deny" type="country">
    list of countries
</media:restriction>

Countries are specified by their ISO 3166 alpha-2 designation. 

Whitelist Mode

<media:restriction relationship="allow" type="country">gb us ca</media:restriction>

Will restrict access to only Great Britain, the United States and Canada.

Blacklist Mode

<media:restriction relationship="deny" type="country">fr ru</media:restriction>

Allows access from all countries except France and the Russian Federation.

Online Feed Validator

Enter your MRSS feed URL below to validate it using the free online tool at feedvalidator.org.

 

Please note: that FeedValidator.org validates against strict compliance with the MRSS standard. The yospaceCDS MRSS parser is less strict and as such a feed that does not validate with FeedValidator.org may still work with yospaceCDS.