Deep Linking to a Website Player

In the article series of Advancing Podcast Technology, I like to publish the following article on how to deep link a podcast episode with a web based player.

To this date, there is no standard way in how podcast publishers can deep link to a particular audio section of a podcast episode. However it would be great for listeners to be able to take a link that directly points to a particular time and mail it to a friend, send a short URL to Twitter or Facebook or add comments to certain parts of the audio. Creating a standard for this would be a great way to also enable podcast clients to create sharing links that point directly to the original publishers website, rather than republishing the audio on another site that is better integrated with the particular podcast client.

Here is my proposal for a potential standard of deep linking:

1. In RSS Feeds add the following atom:link tag to an item:

   <item>
     <link>http://mypodcast.com/episode/index.html</link>
     <atom:link rel="http://podlove.org/deep-link"
       href="http://mypodcast.com/episode/player.html#" />
   </item>

2. In Atom Feeds add the following link tag to an entry:

   <entry>
     <link href="http://mypodcast.com/episode/index.html" />
     <link rel="http://podlove.org/deep-link"
       href="http://mypodcast.com/episode/player.php?t=" />
   </entry>

The rel="deeplink" tag is optional if you prefer to have a different link than the normal episode website link. If this tag does not exist a client that creates a deep link simply uses the normal website link. The client should add a '#'+timecode at the end of the website link and only a timecode at the end of the special deep link.

The timecode format looks like this:
[HH:]MM:SS[.mmm][-[HH:]MM:SS[.mmm]]

Examples:
05:12, 00:05:12, 00:05.12.565, 00:05:12.000-00:13.44.000

The publisher's episode website the deep link points to should read the timecode and start the web player at the particular time. An optional end time can be added to the timecode which should cause the player to stop at that particular time.

March 24th, 2012 • Permalink

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