I understand the end result you want to achieve, but what do you mean with “parse a rss reader through ffplay”? Parsing is taking in a string (text) and building some datastructure from it (like an AST). You can parse a rss feed (it’s XML) but I don’t get what parsing a rss reader is. Also “through ffplay”? You want ffplay to parse your rss for you? Or do you want to parse rss and than have ffplay somehow display the result (the news headlines taking from the feed)? ffplay displays videos and images (I use it as my only video player lol). If you want to render some text underneath a video stream I think you need ffmpeg first and than pipe the result into ffplay.