More Podcasting Seminar comments
Some more reflections on the seminar:
- problems with non-standard ‘chapters’ only readable by iTunes
- issues with MIME type — OS X Apache not configured to recognise m4b type — audio with graphical ‘chapters’
- problems with file transfer and upload — drawbacks with client based applications.
- Before I rave too much about G’band I want to take a look at the XML it creates.
- The big issue is still getting the files onto the server in your local environment — .Mac or Blojsom don’t cut it. It was revealing that when the techie guy uploaded the fancy podcast up to the Blojsom blog he didn’t use FTP, he used drive mapping (the FTP paths can be terrifying). One app I used, ‘ListGarden’ which is actually a perl script asked for file paths in 3 or 4 different places!
- The confusing thing is that different FTP services work in different ways. With Macromedia Dreamweaver you can just enter www for your default web folder. But other apps such as FireFTP (Firefox extension) and Listgarden (RSS generator) and Profcast (Mac podcaster) you need to provide the absolute path from root to your web folder. So for my web folder on Rahu this would be ‘/homes/employees/markp/www’. This info is very difficult to get hold of — it certain took me some anguish to suss out.
- The file had the extension m4b and guess what? The Apache on OS X was not configured with that MIME type so that when he clicked on the obvious link with the file name he got a stream of garbage!
I’m more than ever convinced that what is needed is a server based solution. If Apple want to make real headway they’ll adopt an open source blog like Wordpress and install & configure that on OS X server for podcasting.
Posted by markp at March 10, 2006 10:30 AM