Vista DOES HAVE Podcasting! (but it’s a bit ugly). The RSS screen saver is built in too..

Regular readers (if I have any) will know that RSS is one of my interests. So I noticed Robert Scoble’s post “Windows Media 11’s lack of Podcasting gets noticed” which in turn followed up a post on Geek News Central

For background:

  • Podcasts are just RSS feeds with Enclosures.
  • Internet Explorer handles finding and downloading RSS feeds including Podcasts
  • Applications – certainly Microsoft ones – should use the IE service and NOT implement their own RSS
  • To look at Windows Media Player, it appears that the Windows media Team have never heard of podcasts.

So how do you get a Podcast into WMP 11 ?

  1. In Internet Explorer 7: Find and subscribe to your podcast..
  2. Still in IE, click the "Favourites Center" (Gold star) button, select "feeds", and right click your podcast feed and choose "properties"
  3. In the feed properties make sure the “Automatically download attached files” option is checked. If have to check it you may also need to refresh the feed at this point. You may also want to limit the number of stored files.
  4. Click the “View files” button, a file explorer window will open. Copy the path from the file explorer
  5. In Media player, click “Library”, the “add to Library”. Press “Add” and paste the path you just copied. Hey presto. Media player now has your podcast

If your feed is pictures then you can choose the photos screen saver and paste the path in there too.

By the way, this 5 line VBS script is all that is needed to get a list of feeds and their folders.

Dim rssMgr
Set rssMgr = CreateObject("microsoft.FeedsManager")
For Each rssfeed In rssMgr.RootFolder.Feeds
If rssfeed.DownloadEnclosuresAutomatically then _
wscript.echo rssfeed.Name & "is stored in " & rssfeed.LocalEnclosurePath
Next

MEDIA TEAM IF YOU’RE READING. There is no excuse for not putting this into Media player directly. Let's see it in there before RTM eh ?