Pete Proedahl says we need video playlists: We need video playlists. Ok, to be more specific, we need video players that support playlists. I first implemented XSPF on tinkernet because it was simple, and I like what XSPF is, and can do, and I needed to test the code mentioned here. Of course without a video player that can handle XSPF, whats the point?

He's right. We have to be able to break through the installed-software barrier so that XSPF is always playable, and we have to do it without assistance from Apple, Real, or Microsoft. The fact that Yahoo! Media Engine supports it isn't enough, because it isn't part of Windows or OS X out of the box.

We don't have forever to pull that off. This is not the time for patience -- either XSPF solves a problem within the short term or it has no value.

In his blog about vogs, Adrian Miles sez about XSPF: The file architecture is very very simple and easy to write. It is early days yet, but imagine a playlist that plays all of your videoblogged video. This list could be distributed and used by a player (eg QuickTime Player) and it would turn your video player into the video equivalent of something like iTunes..

blip.tv blog: Theres been some discussion on the Ant user groups lately about XSPF, an XML playlist format. Im considering adding XSPF support to blip. Even if no one uses it today, maybe someone will use it in a month and include blip in a tool that otherwise would have been limited to Webjay..

So let's say Drupal and MFDZ and Blip.tv and Webjay and Wordpress etc are all doing stuff with XSPF. The biggest reason people are using XSPF right now is to take advantage of Fabricio's Flash XSPF Player, but it should be possible to do more for XSPF users. It seems to me that XSPF-based tools like web services to reformat, store, display, and edit playlists would increase the payoff. It also seems to me that web apps specifically oriented towards displaying video playlists are a necessity.

It also seems to me that only web-based apps are capable of breaking the deadlock over installed base. It has been shown over and over again that data formats which depend on pre-installed desktop software will die in the cradle. If pre-installed desktop software is a requirement rather than an upgrade or optimization, restless users will move on.

Ajax hacker supreme Brad Neuberg has a blog entry today about How to Invoke Web Services From a Web Page On A Different Host: There is a way to call remote web services from a web page that is seperate from the one that served the web page itself. This makes it possible to assemble AJAX web pages that call out to a host of different web services across the Internet. This seems pretty damn apropos, so I put in a bit of time to enable his hack to work on Webjay XSPF. To get an XSPF document that will work in that context, just append ?Accept=text/xml to the XSPF URL. For example, http://webjay.org/by/lucas_gonze/organism.xspf will become http://webjay.org/by/lucas_gonze/organism.xspf?Accept=text/xml.

Your HTML would look something like this:

<iframe id="serviceResults" 
        onload="yourCallbackFunction()" 
        src="http://webjay.org/by/lucas_gonze/organism.xspf?Accept=text/xml">
</iframe>

New page on the XSPF wiki: XSPF Wish List. This is for tracking any and all requests. Please don't be bashful!