My friend Michael Verdi has been producing talkbot.tv, a talk show hosted by his Second Life avatar, who happens to be a cocky robot with attitude. The show looks kickass on the web site, a beautiful show player, uncluttered, ready to rock your screen.

But subscribe to it in a reader? Then every episode description is:

“This div will be replaced”
Then a bunch of player parameters
Then the link to the episode mp4
and FINALLY the actual episode description
(click the small image above to see the larger version on Flickr)

So this breaks the performance in iTunes, AppleTV environment, Google reader (any reader), and Boxee.

This isn’t meant as a criticism of Verdi, who has done an amazing job of distributing video online for years now, and who has lead the way figuring out how to do it, and teaching everyone else how to do it. Verdi is a freaking rock star.

This is meant as a shout out to content management system producers, and programmers, and scripters, and web developers, and yes, videobloggers. We still need an easier way to get our shows out, and have them look good in the myriad environments where they might be accessed. And I don’t want to hear it from everyone who’s all enthused about the <video> element that “works” only in certain browsers that 95% of Internet users haven’t adopted yet. Because the reality is that we’re a long way from seeing how support for the <video> element is going to shake down to the masses. I want a solution now.

We need a way to hide the flash information from environments that need to play the MP4 so users can just see the episode information already. It would be nice if that could happen with a WordPress plugin. This is one of the complaints I had about the vPIP plugin, and it’s why I never adopted it for this site, and why I won’t use it in the future. Podpress had this more or less covered, but it’s pretty bloated. I’m on the search for a plugin that works, or a combination of plugin plus hacking the plugin that works.

If you have any good advice, I sure could use it. Light it up in the comments.