Archive for the 'podcast' Category

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Get ready for video podcasting

Published on October 12, 2005 in podcast. 2 Comments


You can argue about whether to call it ‘videocasting’, ‘vodcasting‘, ‘vlogging‘, ‘vblogging’ … But you cannot argue about the surge in buzz about it: John Q. Public is getting ready to create his own movies and show them to the world.

The creation
Just as with podcasting, the barrier of entry for producing content is dropping. With video capability being embedded in digital cameras, mobile phones and webcams, it looks like soon anyone will be capable of recording footage. That movie is then transferred to a PC, maybe edited with Apple iMovie or Windows Movie Maker, encoded into a fitting format and ready for consumption. The definition of ‘a fitting format’ seems to boil down to: Quicktime (.MOV/.MP4), MPEG-1 (.mpg), Windows Media (.WMV) and Audio/Video Interleave (AVI), which should bring the output in the 150Kbps-1Mbps bandwidth range.

The hosting
One might think that, since video uses higher bandwidths than audio, the average video podcast file would be way bigger. Fortunately the average DIY film director seems to limit himself/herself to movies of less than 10 minutes. A podcaster can easily talk for an hour each week (which produces a 30MB file at 64Kbps), but the complexity of acting, editing and producing video makes a 4-minute piece already a considerable accomplishment. Four minutes of video requires only 4 to 20 MB.
There are a number of players that offer free video storage and streaming services.

The audience
No point in making your own movie if no one is going to see it. So you

  • make the formal promise to create a new movie every day/week/month,

  • upload your works of art onto one of the services above,
  • set up your own video blog site, with an RSS feed with enclosures,
  • maybe use the Feedburner Smartcast service to add the Yahoo! Media RSS and Apple iTunes extensions, and
  • register your vodcast in a vodcast directory like vodcasts.tv and loomia.com.
  • make sure your content is well indexed and referenced so you show up in video search engines like Google Video, Yahoo! Video or Blinckx.

And maybe, if you make a documentary that’s good enough, you upload it to Channel Four’s FourDocs and you cross over to the ‘old’ media.

FourDocs is the place to upload or download four minute documentaries. Anyone with a story to tell or an opinion to voice can submit their film to FourDocs.

Also check out their excellent “How-To Make A Documentary” Guides!

(Thanks to Ine for hitting me with the videopodcast hammer until my scepsis gave way for moderate optimism)

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Photofeed: image podcasting

Published on August 18, 2005 in podcast and RSS. 5 Comments

As I said in a previous blog post: it’s not logical that there is no picture podcasting yet, while the content, the devices and the technology are all there. That’s why I decided to lend the ‘loosely coupled’ movement a hand: I just set up a new project:
PHOTOFEED – IMAGE PODCASTING.

It introduces the concept of a Photofeed (an RSS 2.0 feed with image enclosures – the picture counterpart of a podcast feed) and also features a service to display photofeeds in any web site: Photoroll. I invented the term ‘photofeed’ (‘photcast’ was an earlier option, but it’s too limiting)

(Update: especially for the visitors from scripting.com)
What’s so great about a photofeed? Well, since there is an image URL specified separately and attached to each feed item, a photofeed consumer application can ‘do stuff’ with that image. So you could display the image in whatever layout you want on your site (that’s my Photoroll), you could have a photofeed screensaver, print them, make sepia thumbnails, save them to your iPod photo or PDA, …




Who already delivers photofeeds? For now, there’s Fotothing, Pixagogo and Flickr, but I hope soon other photo sharing sites will follow. They have one for each of their tags/labels, so you can have an ever changing feed of ‘sunset’ images and use it for whatever you want. If you want to make your own photofeed, consider using the Feedburner SmartCast for images, which they kindly developed upon my request (doing a ‘Hackathon‘: great idea!).

What is my purpose with this? Well, I want to introduce the concept so people start playing with it and come up with new and untought-of applications. Do you have the “Hey, I could use this to …” feeling? An original hack that does funky stuff with a photofeed? An idea for a way to add ‘fitting’ pictures to an existing text-only RSS feed? Geo-photo-feeds? Some social-software remix project? Let me know, leave a comment here or on the Photofeed Blog. Just picture it!

Inspiration and support came from people who are maybe not aware of it: Joris from Pixagogo, Eric from Feedburner, Alan from Feed2JS, Lucas from Webjay and Erwin from DopplerRadio.

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RSS with images: picture podcasting

Published on June 20, 2005 in podcast and RSS. 10 Comments


There is something weird: after the audio-only iPods came the iPods with images, but there are no iPods for videos (yet). However, we already have video podcasts, but there are to my knowledge hardly any picture podcasts? Why did we skip that medium? The hardware is there, the content is there.

So let’s see how hard this would be. At first glance, you would need the pictures, in an RSS, optionally automagically transferred to the photo device:

RSS with pictures

I found a couple of initiatives for putting images in an RSS so that they can easily be retrieved/manipulated:

Flickr: RSS with image enclosures 

this is the most straightforward and obvious implementation: using the same enclosure tag that made podcasting so simple. The only thing is: they do not include the image size (length=) attribute, probably for performance reasons, but this breaks the validation of the feed. 

Yahoo!: Media RSS 

a more recent effort from Yahoo! to include media files and associated meta-data into RSS. More meta-data means better search accuracy. They use an extra namespace xmlns:media="http://search.yahoo.com/mrss" which is probably the most correct way of doing it, but makes it unfit for podcast use (no podcatcher client recognizes their media:content tag, so nothing is downloaded). They do support multiple enclosures per post item (e.g. a high-quality MPEG-4 video, a low-quality – but faster downloaded – WMV alternative and a JPG screen shot for the same footage). 

pheed.com Pheed RSS 

another extension of RSS 2.0, now with a xmlns:photo="http://www.pheed.com/pheed/" namespace. Same remarks as above: no podcast recognition. They also use the Dublin Core namespace, which is probably a good idea. 

solitude.dk 

Andreas had a proposal for changing the RSS2.0 standard, allowing multiple enclosures per item. Better go with the Yahoo! route for that, I guess.

My conclusions: you need the enclosure tag for compatibility with existing applications. You need the length= attribute for conformance to the RSS specs. So I’d start with what Flickr does, entend it with the length (even it’s just an estimation based on image pixel size, I don’t think many applications verify the actual size). But you could combine this with the Yahoo! Media RSS namespace (a bit like using the embed tag within the object for embedded media players) in the same feed.
Feedburner
Feedburner no longer adds image URLs as enclosures to their feeds (too many user problems, Eric Lunt tells me). So you cannot use Feedburner for constructing the RSS feed. (I tried it with Blogger and SmartCast and indeed, no success). They do support Yahoo! Media RSS as output format. They actually use the combination I described above. So we’re one step away from the perfect image feed constructor: Feedburner (optionally) enables image (JPEG/GIF/PNG) attachments to be converted to enclosures (with their usual automatic length= detection).

Transfer to device

I tried to use a mixed enclosure/MediaRSS feed in the iPodder podcast client, and it works like a charm. All references images are downloaded and stored under [iPodder download folder]\[Feed name]\[filename]. Whcih means you only have to specify the [iPodder download folder] as e.g. iTunes’ ‘Image root folder’ and all pictures will be synchronized with the iPod photo. Each feed is a separate folder, and a separate album on the iPod. Super! I guess the Doppler podcast aggregator would work as good.

Applications

Whether the pictures are consulted on a iPod or other portable multimedia device, or online in an aggregator or Bloglines, people can dream up a load of neat applications.

  • Gadget freaks could subscribe to an Engadget GSM ‘photo-cast’ of the latest must-have mobile phones. 
  • Parents could create a ‘kidcast’ for pictures of their newborn so the relatives can be automatically updated
  • casting directors could use a ‘casting-cast’ to get updated on new faces …
  • A TV channel could subscribe to the RSS’es of the main news agencies.
  • Simple: a PHP script that takes the RSS and shows your 5 most recent pictures in the side menu of your blog
  • …

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Propaganda: podcast creation tool by Mixmeister

Published on May 30, 2005 in podcast. 1 Comment


While checking for the latests versions of Mixmeister software, the excellent audio tool for crafting MP3 mixes, (they’re at release 6.0 now), I also noticed they just released Propaganda, a Windows software for creating p0dcasts. They’ve built it on the Mixmeister engine: accurate automatic detection of BPM (tempo) and downtime (1st beat of a measure), flawless time-stretching (speeding a song up or down without changing the pitch) and manipulation through a timeline based editor.

They also discovered a better way to limit the capabilities of their demo versions: instead of shutting the program down after 15 minutes – which is always unpleasant when you’re in the middle of trying something out – you now have a voice-over every 5 minutes that announces the fact that you’re using a trial version. At $49 for the full version, this is a good choice for any podcaster who wants an easy-to-use solution to create his programs.

If you’re more of a DJ, try one of the Mixmeister series (there’s a free trial version for each of them):

  • MixMeister Express 6 ($50)
  • MixMeister Studio 6 ($170 – key detection and mutiple mixes)
  • MixMeister Pro 6 ($280 – with video support).

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