MediaRss libraries now on codeplex

I have just published a new Codeplex project: http://mediarss.codeplex.com/. This project has grown out of a larger effort I am currently working on. I had a need to read and write MediaRss files. If you aren’t familiar with the MediaRss spec it is an RSS spec originally developed by Yahoo for their video search engine. It has since been adopted by the wider community and is becoming more standardized. For details on the spec itself see here and here.

For what I am working on this format worked well for me. However, there wasn’t much out there in the way of C# libraries that did any of the heavy lifting for me. In general parsing RSS is trivial in .NET but there are a few oddities about this spec that lead me down the path of building my own library. It took a little tedious work to complete but now it as at point where it is useful to me and I felt it could be valuable to others looking for a quick solution to dealing with MediaRss files.

I leveraged the SyndicationFeed object model from .NET 3.5 to make consuming the feed feel natural to those already familiar with this model. The usage looks like this

var reader = XmlReader.Create("SampleMedia.rss");
var feed = SyndicationFeed.Load<MediaRssFeed>(reader);

What you get back is a strongly typed MediaRssFeed object. You can then treat it like you would any other SyndicationFeed object. I have also included an extension method to easily cast the Items property of the MediaRssFeed to the MediaRssItem object. To do that you would do:

var feed = SyndicationFeed.Load<MediaRssFeed>(reader);
IEnumerable<MediaRssItem> feedItems = feed.Items.AsMediaRssItems();

This lets you dive into all the properties on the items that are specific to the MediaRss spec. I still have a little more work to do to fully support the spec but it is most of the way there. The unit test project is best the place to see the samples of how to read and write using the library and how to inspect the different properties of the object. You can get the compiled binaries and / or the full source code from here. Enjoy.