Previously, I discussed how the GameTrailers.com RSS feeds can are manipulated to output just about any kind of media from the GameTrailers.com web site for use in your Boxee application. Pulling in the feed into your Boxee app is just one thing as the feed itself is also just as powerful with gobs of juicy information just waiting to be displayed in your app.

The best way to view the source of the RSS is using Mozilla Firefox. Just load up one of the feeds mentioned in the previous post. At the Feed preview page, right click anyway on the page and and select View Page Source.

GameTrailers.com already offers a simple explanation of what each item in the feed does. This post is going to focus on the tags that would be of most importances to a Boxee app. I’ll use the old mockup design I had for GameTrailers.com RSS 0.2 to illustrate how these tags can be used.

1. The Feed
Each section listed (Newest Media, Trailers, Features, etc.) here are all RSS feeds. For the purpose of this example, the following feed would be used in (1):
http://www.gametrailers.com/rssgenerate.php?s1=&favplats[xb360]=xb360&orderby=newest

As you learned in the previous post, s1 is left blank so it’ll pull all media from GameTrailers.com. Within all that media, we just want anything related to the Xbox 360 that is new. Since no limit is included in the feed URL, only 20 results will be returned.

The kicker here is you can save yourself a LOT of hardcoding of the feeds. Since you know the favplats parameter can be changed to any platform, you can change the feed to look similar to something like this:
http://www.gametrailers.com/rssgenerate.php?s1=&favplats[x]=x&orderby=newest

where x is a value passed down from the main sections in the app (in this case, the various gaming platforms) and fill x as needed.

2. exInfo:movieTitle
Now that we know what feed we’ll be pulling in, we can now display the output of the results of the feed as needed. Going in the order of how the feed’s tags, the first item we run into is <exInfo:movieTitle>. The the tag indicated, this is the title of the movie itself, usually a short description of what the movie is about.

3. exInfo:gameName
Next is <exInfo:gameName>, which is the name of the game the movie is associated with.

4. exInfo:platform
The fourth item of use is <exInfo:platform>, which is the console that movie is related to. This is important as if you are scrolling though a list of games of various consoles (such as any new media posted on GameTrailers.com), it’s good to know which console the game/movie is for.

5. exInfo:image
<exInfo:image> is a small thumbnail for the movie. The image has a 178 x 74 pixels. I have yet to find a way to manipulate the URL of the image to get a larger size. For now, this is the only option. If you attempt to use the default thumbnail produced for the feed itself (from the <image> tag), the same picture will appear for all your images. That is why you want to use <exInfo:image> instead.

6. description
We are now left with the <description> tag, which provides a full description of the movie. I don’t think I need to say anything more than that.

Again, there are plenty of other details in the RSS Feed from GameTrailers.com that can be used and played with, but if you want to get a GameTrailers.com app up and going, the above essentials should get you going.

At this time, there’s not much more that I can go into on the RSS Feed. If you have any questions about the other pieces of the app, looking for suggestions, or have any else to say or ask, feel free to contact me. I’ll be sure to list any questions (with answers) that people ask here on the blog for others to see in case they were curious about the same thing.