What’s Google Reader Trying to Do
Google November 26th, 2006 - By Haochi
It’s been a long time Google Reader starting to embed audio players in feed that contains audio files, hmm, currently MP3s only. However, Google Reader is trying to include EVERYTHING in the audio player, like WMV files, as shown above, though it doesn’t work.
So, is Google going to let us watch video directly in Google Reader in the future? Probably. They might convert(you can’t play WMV directly in Flash players) the video files and upload to Google Video, or YouTube (with content owners’ permission) as soon as they finds multi-media files in the feed.
Anyways, that’s just an unreliable hypothesis(what a contradiction), take it with a small grain of salt. Check out Philipp’s post “Archive.org Founder Criticizes Google Book Scanning (Video)” on Google Blogoscoped.
[error corrected, thanks Joshie Surber]
November 26th, 2006 at 8:16 pm
I believe you mean “a small grain”. The phrase “take … with a grain of salt” comes from the days before proper food preservation. Salt was a necessity in life because it took the nasty flavor out of unpreserved and improperly prepared food. The “grain of salt” phrase applies to a statement that is “seasoned” enough already, and therefore only needs a small amount of salt on it.
November 26th, 2006 at 9:35 pm
Thanks for point it out, sometimes less is better lol. Error fixed. I didn’t know that’s the story. :D
November 27th, 2006 at 1:26 pm
In this case, Reader is trusting the site owner to provide correct information. In his feed, Philipp’s enclosue link looks like this:
<enclosure url=”http://blog.outer-court.com/videos/brewster-kahle.wmv” length=”3935416″ type=”audio/mpeg”/>
Reader sees the type=”audio/mpeg” attribute and assumes the enclosure is an MP3 that it can play. I’ll ping Philipp so he can fix this.
Mihai Parparita
Google Reader Engineer
November 27th, 2006 at 4:43 pm
Thanks for the info, Mihai. :D
By the way, sorry that Akismet marked your comment as spam… False-positive.