Techspansion is no more

Nostalgia

Which may not mean a lot to most people, but they produced the software I blogged about on here recently called VisualHub and AudialHub.  The second I didn’t get to try out in the end, and the first is the primary solution I use for converting video files from one format to another, and in my case specifically, producing the iPod compatible mp4 files (H264 codec).

Apparently the products will still be compatible with the next Mac OS (10.6 – Snow Leopard), but with the recipient hardware changing regularly and rapidly (iPods etc), the software will become dated very quickly.

It is disappointing, and somewhat surprising that they’ve simply closed their doors and discontinued the product, rather than selling it.  Guess I will be looking for a new conversion solution in the near future.

The Turbo264 is ok, but doesn’t produce as small a file with the same quality, and more importantly, cannot handle static images (such as powerpoint slides) inside the video file – they tend to run like a watercolour painting in a rainstorm – weird, and unusable.

Assembling a Podcast

The steps involved in producing a podcast are surprisingly straight-forward, but it took me some time and research to find out just how to go about it all. This is not intended to be a comprehensive list of instructions – at some stage I may put together a bit of a video package of the steps, but in the meantime, this is a down-and-dirty solution to get prospective podcasters started at least.

It can be either an audio or video podcast – the steps are pretty much identical. I haven’t tried to do an audio only one, and as funny as it sounds, you’d think video was harder. In reality I guess they are about equal, but I haven’t tried an audio only one before. That isn’t quite true – I haven’t gotten an audio one to the stage where I thought it would be interesting enough to podcast, whereas I seem, strangely, quite happy to stand in front of a video camera. Weird huh.

What you need for the process is:

1. Somewhere to host the audio file. This can be your own server (for my very first episode, I set up a Mac at home as a web server, but decided as the show quickly grew that I didn’t have the bandwidth to support such a move, so looked for an external solution). There are plenty of free solutions for this, but remember that if you continue to grow your site, that your need for storage space will also grow. Have a look at blip.tv – I use it for my videos, and it also can take audio files. They need to be mp3 for audio, and mp4 for video if you intend to get the result into iTunes. I have no idea how much space I am already using (for free), but it must have already passed 3GB. You set up a show, upload your files and that is step one complete.

Actually, the direction blip.tv has gone, that may actually be almost all you need to do – they now have check boxes for you to have that ’show’ iTunes ready. What that means is there is then an iTunes compatible feed ready for you to link to iTunes. So if that is all you want to do, skip ahead to the final step!

2. If you want to take it a bit further, the next thing is to set up a blog, and make a post that includes a link to your audio file on blip.tv I set a category for those posts called podcast, and that gives me a RSS feed with just the relevant posts included.

A blog is a nice extra – it gives somewhere for people to go to read about the content of your podcast episode, you can provide links, images etc.

I use WordPress.com – again it is free, and has nice templates. As you can see from this blog!

3. You then need to produce an iTunes compatible feed. So the next step is to take the RSS feed for your podcast posts (which will look something like abc.wordpress.com/category/podcast/feed ) and head over to www.feedburner.com

Feedburner takes your standard RSS feed, and provides an iTunes compatible one. With this address ready to go, head over to iTunes, register, and set up a new podcast – there is a link to do just that. Submit your feedburner feed (or your blip.tv one, if you have skipped step 2), sit back and wait. In 48 hours or so, they will have checked the content of your podcast and approved it, and presto, you will be on iTunes.

Hopefully, that is enough to get you started. However, it has been ages since I set mine up, so I might have missed a few minor points. I spend ages researching all the requirements to find out the above steps. They seem so easy in hindsight.

See you in the blogosphere.

File Formats

One of the very confusing aspects of using computers is a lack of standards, and file formats.  In some instances a default format has risen because of the monopolistic tendencies of some companies, and the one that comes to everyone’s mind in the first instance is Microsoft.  That isn’t necessarily a bad thing, although it does stifle development so getting the balance right is tricky indeed.

For written documents, the Word format (.doc) has become pretty much the default, although even that is under threat from the very organisation that established it as a household name, and with the release of Office 07, the format .docx has reared its head.

The very basic format for text, without any significant formatting is .txt and this makes this format quite universal – most programs at least know what this sort of file is and how to deal with it.  The next one up the scale is .rtf – Rich Text Format.  This then allows more complex formatting, different fonts, bold, italic etc, and still is pretty transferable from system to system and program to program.  From that point, formats spring up all over the place.  .doc, .docx, .odt (open document text format – for OpenOffice – a free alternative to Microsoft Word) and so on.  There are over 60 different document formats, but obviously very few are in common use today.

The same ‘problem’ exists for spreadsheets, databases, images, videos, sound and on and on.  For the average user, the whole issue is very confusing which is no surprise.  We will slowly weave our way through the different types, and formats, and hopefully you will start to get a feeling for all these 3 (and now more) letter suffixes that follow the file names.

Not to preempt the future articles, but these are some that you will (hopefully) become more conversant with:

.doc .txt .rtf .xls .jpg .pdf .dng .avi .mov .mp3 .mp4 .m4a .m4v .jpg .gif .tif .html

I could go on (and on) for a while – this is not a comprehensive list, nor even in order of importance.  Once you have a bit of a handle on this, it will all become just a little bit clearer.

One of the benefits of this will be not only understanding that there are different file formats, and their uses, but also the fact that it is possible to convert a file from one format to another.  For example, taking a file from a strange, or less used format and changing it into a more common format that you can then work with.