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Media RSS for Digital Signage

Media RSS for Digital Signage

Media RSS for Digital Signage (MRSS) allows you to add multimedia feeds to your content. You would typically use this plugin together with subscriptions to third-party content providers, like ScreenFeed and many others. While we try to provide all the essential plugins for standard digital signage installations, there are always scenarios when something extra is needed. Digital Signage content providers fill in the gap and provide interesting content to make your screens stand out.

Find the Media RSS plugin

Finding the Media RSS plugin for digital signage

When logged in, find the playlist you want to add it to, open the playlist, and find the Media RSS plugin under RSS.

How does it work?

Typically you purchase a feed from the content provider, and then you paste the feed URL into our Media RSS for digital signage widget.

You can find a list of content providers here:
https://www.sixteen-nine.net/2015/12/01/content-subscription-options-feeding-digital-signage-beast/

You’ll find feeds covering many topics, such as:

  • Social feeds (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram)
  • News
  • Infotainment (Trivia / Clips / On This Day / Quotes, etc…)
  • Weather
  • Sports
  • Financial (Stock prices)
  • Local Traffic
  • …and many more

Options

  • Alignment – Fit to scale, align left, align center, align right, align top, align center, align button, lock
  • Media RSS feed URL – Input your Media RSS URL.
  • Transition – Set the incoming transition effect for new entries.
  • Transition Duration – Set the transition duration in seconds
  • Refresh Interval – Pick how often the content should refresh in minutes.
  • Position – Adjust the positioning of the plugin pixel by pixel
  • Sizing – Adjust the size of the plugin pixel by pixel.

Social media

Third-party integrations enable to link between multiple major social media platforms (Instagram, Facebook, Twitter & LinkedIn).

FAQ

My feed is not loading

Keep in mind MediaRSS is not the same as RSS and HTML – Read more about what MediaRSS is and how it’s used.

We can’t always determine whether or not the URL you’re using is valid or not, but we do our best. When you insert the URL our validator will check several parameters. If the URL fails you should see one of the following messages.

  • “Not found“, means the validator didn’t get anything in return when trying the URL.
  • “No RSS found on page, is this RSS feed?“, means the validator found a feed, but none of it was classified as MediaRSS or even RSS.
  • “Returned feed did not contain channel items or media. Content looks like a regular RSS feed.“, which means the validator found the feed, but the feed is not a MediaRSS feed, just a regular RSS feed.

What is the difference between RSS feed and Media RSS feed?

Both are XML formatted data structures and both can contain images, so differentiating them can be confusing. Generally, news sites and blogs publish an RSS feed whereas paid content for digital signage is mostly MediaRSS.

RSS was not originally designed to contain media (images, videos), so there is no standardized location of where the image element is positioned in XML. Over testing many feeds we have discovered found 6 different locations to look for the image tag, but it does not have to be present at all. If the media is present, it’s a thumbnail typically, meant to complement the text rather than be shown as full screen. MediaRSS was designed to address the shortcomings of RSS and each <item> contains the media inside <media:content> tag, so it’s always in one place and the media item is the core of the content (rather than a complementing thumbnail as in RSS). The second big difference is that the media items inside MRSS contain a duration, so the feed itself defines how long the items are shown.