A few people have asked me how to get video clips to show up in iTunes just like podcasts do. There’s no real trick to it.
Actually, there is one trick for subscribers. To see the video in iTunes, you need to select “Show Artwork” from the Edit menu. The video plays in a wee little area in the bottom left corner. Click on it to play it in a larger separate window.
For pod/videocasters, create your video in some format that QuickTime can play back. I highly recommend you use 3ivx to encode your videos. This is what Rocketboom is using and their videos are incredibly sharp and smooth yet the file sizes are reasonable. (And Amanda Congdon has such big, beautiful…ah…eyes.) At $20 for the encoding software, it’s a steal. And make sure your sound quality is good. Crappy sound makes the video seem crappy too.
Then, all you need to do is enclose the video file in your RSS file exactly the same way you normally do it with your MP3 file. My blog here runs on WordPress. When I write a post containing a link to a media file, WordPress automatically generates the RSS file with an enclosure tag. If you have a web server that runs Apache, PHP and MySQL, WordPress is a breeze to install.
If you’re looking for a web host to run WordPress, Dreamhost is utterly amazing. I pay less than $8 a month, for a hosting plan chocked full of more stuff than I could list here. What they offer for such a low price is insane. Something new is that for every week you’re with them, they increase your disk quota by 20MB and bandwidth by 1GB. I currently get 141GB bandwidth per month (I use about 50GB) and 2820 MB of disk space. And if you sign up through the link here, a friend of mine in the US who’s out of work and going through some bad times gets the commission.
i had some video clips downloaded from the internet that i want to be put in my i-tunes. I have them all saved into a folder. it won’t work… what do i do?
Open iTunes so your entire library is being displayed, then drag the video files into the library. If they can be played with QuickTime, they’ll be added to the library. Note that doesn’t necessarily mean they can be played on your video iPod if you have one.