Content customizing basics

Adobe Media Player is an aggregator for Flash-based FLV and H.264 video content. Adobe Media Player uses RSS to help deliver content for subscription. It allows viewers to discover and subscribe to Internet TV shows and video podcasts, and manage those assets on their computer.

Additionally, Adobe Media Player is tightly integrated with new features of Flash Media Server 3 to support audience measurement, and Flash Media Rights Management Server to support content integrity capabilities. Adobe Media Player also supports an extended XML namespace that facilitates custom branding and advertising features.

Adobe Media Player enables you to deliver:

• A Feed of a video show and its associated episodes, in the form of a plain RSS feed. RSS feeds can contain an RSS item, using either a media tag with Media RSS, or an enclosure tag with RSS 2.0. A Feed can also contain extended branding elements that better associate your branding with your content in Adobe Media Player.
• An Enhanced Feed, which is a Feed of a video show and its associated episodes that also contains references to at least one Adobe Media Orchestration Document. AMODs contain the logic for orchestrating and delivering additional media content, such as pre-roll ads, banner ads, and overlays. If you work with an advertising network, your advertising network can also deliver AMODs containing advertising assets, which you can reference in your Enhanced Feeds. These are referred to as nested AMODs, or SMIL-in-SMIL. For more information, see "Enabling external ad packages" in "Delivering advertising".

In a Feed, you can deliver your video to Adobe Media Player in a branded experience (see Figure 1). The branding elements in a Feed, however, are static—they are not subject to change as the viewer watches the video content. Using AMODs in an Enhanced Feed, you can orchestrate the entire viewing experience by changing elements as the viewer watches your video content to, for example, deliver dynamic advertising:

• The Navigation pod (on the left) lists three Shows (Feeds) from the Comedy Central Network. The Comedy Central Stand-Up Show is selected on the left.
• The Content pod (on the right) shows items from the selected Feed as Episodes with a thumbnail image for each.
• Adobe Media Player supports FLV, F4V and H.264-compatible files; only Feeds that point to compatible files are displayed in the Episode tab.
• The Info tab shows Feed-level metadata that applies to the entire show.

Figure 1. Feed display in Adobe Media Player

For more information on Feeds, see "An overview of Feeds" later in this article. For information on Enhanced Feeds, see "An overview of Enhanced Feeds" in Delivering your advertising in Adobe Media Player.

An overview of the content customizing workflow

Perform the following steps to prepare your content for display in Adobe Media Player:

1. Encode your video content to either FLV, F4V, or H.264, and create an RSS feed of your video content that references these video files. See the section "RSS feed customization" later in this article.
2. Add the show and episode branding elements you want to include in your Feeds. See Customizing your branding in Adobe Media Player.

Note: Advanced features are also available for advertisements (see Delivering your advertising in Adobe Media Player), measurement (see Measurement basics in Adobe Media Player), content protection (see Applying content protections in Adobe Media Player), and for distributing content over the web (see Distributing content in Adobe Media Player using a website badge). Before attempting to use these advanced features, take some time to ensure you have a good grasp of how to work with basic Feeds.

H.264 and supported file formats

Adobe Media Player supports downloads of the H.264 enclosures and file formats listed in Table 1, along with their corresponding MIME types.

Table 1. Adobe Media Player supported H.264 enclosures and file formats

File extension	MIME type
FLV	video/x-flv
F4V	video/x-f4v
MP4	video/mp4
MP4V	video/mp4v-es
M4V	video/x-m4v
3GP	video/3gpp
3G2, 3GPP2	video/3gpp2
MOV	video/quicktime

RSS feed customization

The following checklist provides suggestions for creating and customizing your content into a Feed that could be successfully added to the Adobe Media Player Catalog:

1. Create a template document for a Feed. The following example shows an RSS feed template using RSS 2.0:

   <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> 
   <rss version="2.0" xmlns:amp="http://www.adobe.com/amp/1.0" xmlns:media="http://search.yahoo.com/mrss"> 
      <channel> 
         <title></title> 
         <link></link> 
         <description></description> 
         <copyright></copyright> 
         <item> 
            <title></title> 
            <guid isPermaLink="false"></guid> 
            <description></description> 
            <pubDate></pubDate> 
            <enclosure url="" type=""/> <media:thumbnail url=""/> 
         </item> 
      </channel> 
   </rss> 

2. Fill in the channel-level fields (title, link, description, copyright), which define the core metadata for the Feed.

   Important:Strings for show titles must not exceed 31 characters.

3. After creating and publishing your branding assets, add the appropriate extension elements to the Feed. For more information on adding branding to your Feed, see Customizing your branding in Adobe Media Player.

   Advanced Metadata and Extensions: Add any additional fields which are relevant to your show:

   • category: Affects how the show is categorized when added to the Catalog.
   • media:credit: Defines the credits displayed in the Show Info screen.
   • media:rating: Indicates if the content is adult in nature.
   • amp:presentAs: Indicates if the show should be presented as a storyline.
4. For each episode that should appear in the Feed, create a separate item with the given metadata elements (title, unique ID, description, date). Specify the URL for a thumbnail image to represent the episode. If you want to create an orchestrated media experience, create an Enhanced Feed using AMODs. Enhanced Feeds allow you to orchestrate video playback, banner display, logo display, and overlay ad display. If you want to eliminate advertisements from your content display, use either a FLV or H.264 media file (such as MP4) instead of an AMOD. Then, in the XML, specify the URL to the media file—for example, FLV, MP4, AMOD; you can use HTTP for the URL, or use RTMP if you plan to stream content.
5. If you want to provide multiple representations of the same episode, use the media:group element. Episode grouping is helpful if you want to:
   • Provide episodes in different formats, such as FLV and MOV, to support a wider variety of video aggregators.
   • Provide episodes at different bit rates, to support varied viewer bandwidths and microprocessor speeds.

Note: Adobe Media Player does not support Syndication feed extensions, nor does it support RSS 2.0 skipDays and skipHours variables.

Tip: If all episodes have the same date, set the download order by episode name media:title alphabetically, not description. If valid dates are not included for the episodes, Adobe Media Player lists them in the order they are listed in the Feed.

Tip: If your Feed is an RSS 2.0 feed, specify dates using three-character month representations. For example, the pubDate format is:
<pubDate>Fri, 17 Oct 2006 12:21:30 -500</pubDate>.

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