As part of my effort to build a replacement for the FrameChannel service I captured a sample of the existing RSS feed my frame receives.
Fundamentally it is an implementation of the Yahoo MRSS (Media RSS) specification. You can find details here and here.
If you are interested in grabbing a copy of your frame’s feed you’ll need the custom URL for your frame and to set the USER-AGENT header to ‘AVOS/1.1 libhttp/1.1’ (without the quote marks of course).
My frame requested this URL:
http://rss.framechannel.com/productId=KDxxxx/language=en/frameId=xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx
I’ve removed some of the details so as not to tempt the nefarous among us. The ‘frameId’ field is obviously the MAC address of my frame. I’ve not yet figured out how productId is derived.
I just gave your .rss sample file, and the FC Checklist document a quick scan, and a couple obstacles I see are that the frame is going to rss.framechannel.com for the photo info. Won’t the frame’s firmware need to be changed to access a different service? Also, Thinking Screen owns the product ID numbers and specs associated with each product. They may not legally give that up, even if they wanted to. I’m sure there’s more issues, but I’ve stared at my glowing rectangle enough for today.
Thanks for looking into this.
The RSS http://rss.framechannel.com/user=UserName/pin=YourChannelPin should work as a custom picture rss as well. I have tried it with my W820.
@Ralf: That assumes, of course, that
rss.framechannel.comcontinues to lead to a functioning service. 😉I’m running my own DNS server so I can point rss.framechannel.com to anywhere, so that part should be easy for me at least. I came home today to the message framechannel is sending out now.. Framechannel died today and all they send is a picture telling you just that.
It looks like my Toshiba frame removed the FrameChannel option, maybe through some sort of a firmware update. So even if I could redirect the request, I don’t think it would work.
I wonder if framealbum needs to get the framechannel domain.
@Paul: I’ve exchanged a few emails with the folks at FrameChannel about releasing the domain (rss.framechannel.com) so that others could build a service. So far, the answer is ‘No’. I understand that this domain is likely entwined with other services that the company provides and may be difficult to pull apart.
Aside from that, there is good news/bad news. The good news is that it is possible to re-direct that domain to a new service; the bad news is that it requires manipulating a DNS server to supply the new response. This is OK for the more nerdly of our community but certainly not for the vast majority of folks.
I’m going to keep trying!
I also own a Toshiba DMF82XWU which had Picasa support (but does not really display all pictures and very spotty) and had Frame Channel, but now I don’t even see it in the settings anymore. I am not really sure how it worked before but I would love to have network/internet compatibility so I can finally get my online pictures without having to upload/copy pictures every single time I want to add new pix.