Native RSS parsing

Hi - I've searched and tried all manner of plugins, even hacking away at the live feeds plugin, but to no avail - I just cant get RSS feed items to render. The folder gets displayed under online, but there's nothing within.
I've manually constructed an xml file on my own local webserver, to the specs defined in the help.
Is there any reason why it can't just serve online content *without* a plugin to do the extraction? If not, is there a generic plugin that will just do the stream and thumbnail passed straight through as content items? I don't need any transcoding or url manipulation, just need it to pass the content and thumbnail urls through.

[zip]

You can do it. here is an example: http://www.ted.com/talks/rss

Use the enclosure tag for the video.