Topic: Filmwasters Podcasts: An End to Download Problems?

[Ed Wenn]

Some of you may remember that we've had problems in the past with podcast downloads being a bit flaky. After a few months of intermittently trying to get this fixed I took a look at our podcast stats last week and was surprised at how popular the show is (over 5000 listens to the last one, for instance). It then occurred to me that the download problems may have been as a result of our Web host simply not being up to the job of serving thousands of MP3s over a short period of time every time we released a new episode.

To address this I've moved all of our podcasts to a dedicated podcast hosting provider (podbean.com) and I hope that will be the end of the download problems.

N.B. This is a behind-the-scenes type of change and you won't need to do anything differently if you're an existing listener/subscriber.

• The podcast homepage is still at http://filmwasters.com/podcast/
• The iTunes link will be the same (but I'd appreciate it if someone could check this for me)
• The RSS feed address is still http://filmwasters.com/podcast/feed

I've tested that it all hangs together, but if you're one of the people who's experienced download problems in the past it would be great if you could retry and let me know how you get on.

[Urban Hafner]

It works in iTunes for me. It even downloaded episodes 1 and 2. Though I'm not sure if iTunes just 'forgot' that it had already downloaded them or if they are 'new' to my iTunes. Anyway the download speed was quite reasonable.

Urban

[Ed Wenn]

Thanks for the feedback. Glad that iTunes is still working.

 

[LT]

still no indication fo the video podcast on iTunes though ... not sure what to do about that ......

[Ed Wenn]

It won't show up until sometime tomorrow. I have to do some jiggery pokery round the back end (missus) and I have to wait until Vimeo presents us with an MP4 of the video as opposed to the much larger WMV which is there at present. As soon as the MP4 video appears (1 week after upload - i.e. tomorrow) I'll update the page and iTunes and all other feeds should contain a link to the downloadable video.

Hey presto (well, hopefully!)

 

[Francois]

I don't know if you can submit the files in some other format but I just checked Super and it has support for MP4, FLV and AVI containers using the Xvid, Divx, MP4 and H264 codecs for video (among others) and audio in MP3, Vorbis, AC3 (and much more.) It also does expert resampling, resizing and bitrate conversions. All this for free.

[Ed Wenn]

Francois, thanks a lot for the link to Super. It looks great & I'll definitely be using it in the future.

The question of video formats w/ regard to our podcast is moot however. Because some people experienced problems when trying to download the audio podcast, I've decided not to host the video source file internally, but to let Vimeo do that for us. You can upload many different video formats to Vimeo & they convert it for streaming purposes (via either Flash or, more recently, native HTML 5). They leave your original file for a week and include a download link to it. After a week they re-encode the file as an MP4 (smaller) and delete your original. In other words, it doesn't really matter what format I save my original as.

Because the original link is only for a week there's no point inlcuding it in our feeds and anyway, the WMV is too big at around 370MB to expect most people to download it to their computers/phones/media players.