Put Your Videos on OTHER People's iPods
Pages: 1, 2

Blogging Software

Shawn's site is hosted on his own server, but uses free blogging software from WordPress to make everything work easily. WordPress is a very polished solution for setting up and maintaining a blog, and it includes automatic RSS feed production for an updating media podcast.

Installing WordPress can be quite easy, but tweaking it to do exactly what you want can be tricky. I'm pretty computer-savvy, but I pay Shawn to set up and tweak my WordPress blogs. (He's available for more of this work; contact him if you want.) There are several sites with forums on how to solve issues that invariably come up while setting up and configuring WordPress. One of the best ones is the official WordPress support forum, where users help each other solve problems.

Royal Hosting

Running a popular video blog serves up a lot of media files, and that results in a lot of bandwidth usage (throughput). A one-page article in text format has a file size of around 1/100 of a megabyte. An MP3 audio file of you reading that same page will be around 4 megabytes. An MP4 iPod video of you reading that will be around 40 megs. If you've got hundreds or even thousands of people subscribed to your video feed all downloading 40-meg videos weekly or daily, that can add up to terabytes of throughput. With some web hosting companies, that can end up costing hundreds or thousands of dollars.

Shawn and I host our media with DreamHost, a service that offers shared hosting, which is very cost-effective. Shared hosting means you and many other people share space on a single server computer. Because of that, your site may be down an hour or so a month. That is not the case with much more expensive dedicated hosting, which financial corporations use for mission-critical data, but the price for DreamHost is certainly right. I pay $84 a year for several terabytes per month of server space and throughput.

I'm hosting 23 very active domains, three blogs, three audio podcasts, and four RSS feeds on DreamHost, and I'm using only 8% of my available storage space and only 10% of my available monthly throughput. And the amount they give you of both increases each week. They also offer low-cost domain registration, free statistical reports, and cool goodies like one-click WordPress installations.

When you sign up for DreamHost, if you enter my code, DEAN, you'll even get a $10 discount. (I get some free time for each signup that uses my code, but I would never endorse a service that I didn't use.) I really love DreamHost, and I've researched many, many hosting solutions. It's the only one I've found that fits my budget, is run well, is easy to use, and offers a lot of variety and extensibility.

Converting Video for iPod

So with the infrastructure laid down, let's step back and look at the video. In order to make your videos playable on an iPod, so you can put them on an RSS feed, you'll need to convert them to MP4 video format.

Sony Vegas has MP4 format as one of the drop-down export options, but for some reason, the MP4 format exported from the current version of Vegas (as of this writing) will not play on all video iPods; Sony tells me they're working on that.

To make a file that can be played on all video iPods, I use a program called Allok Video to MP4 Converter (Windows XP, $29.99). Figure 3 shows the settings I like to use. This excellent program can use almost any video format or size as input, and it automatically renders out perfect iPod-ready MP4 files.

Fig. 3. Allok Video to MP4 Converter with recommended settings. (Click to enlarge.)

Apple QuickTime Pro (available for Mac or PC) can also output for iPod, but doesn't offer as many controls over the parameters as Allok. Apple iMovie (Mac only) can also render video for iPod. [Ed. Note: I've used Handbrake (Mac/Win/Linux) and Videora (Win) successfully; both are free.]

Using Your Blog to Get Your Videos Out There in the World

Once you have your WordPress blog set up, and you've converted your video to iPod format, you simply write a blog post in the WordPress interface in your browser (see Figure 4), and then upload and tag your video. (See Figure 5.)

Fig. 4: The WordPress Write-Post interface.

Fig. 5. Uploading and tagging your video in the WordPress interface.

After you hit the "Publish" button, your blog post will be viewable to the world in any computer with a browser and an Internet connection, and WordPress will automatically update your RSS feed and send out a ping to iTunes and other podcast directories to let people's podcatching software know that a new video is available. Your subscribers' computers will then download the videos automatically. That will happen almost immediately if they are online and have iTunes open. When I release a new episode, my stats show about a hundred downloads within the first hour. Within a day, it's many thousands.

Getting Listed on the iTunes Store

Getting your podcast listed on the iTunes Store can dramatically increase the number of people who subscribe. You won't make any money doing it, as it's free to subscribe to a podcast on the iTunes Store, but it's definitely worth doing. Here's the technical info on how to submit your podcast.

Keep in mind that some blogging software, particularly WordPress, will automatically do a lot of this for you. If you set up WordPress properly, you can skip to the technical stuff on the link above and go directly to iTunes to submit your podcast for review and inclusion. You can go directly to iTunes' "Submit Podcasts to the iTunes Directory" screen by entering this URL in a web browser:

https://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZFinance.woa/wa/publishPodcast.

From there, simply copy and paste your RSS feed URL from your blog into iTunes. iTunes will automatically grab your podcast name, title image, category listing, contact info, and podcast description from your WordPress interface. Within 24 to 72 hours, you'll get an e-mail confirming that you've been accepted. Apple pretty much accepts anything that doesn't violate its Terms of Service. The reasons it might reject a podcast (or later remove it) are enumerated at the bottom of this page.

Creating an RSS feed to make your videos downloadable and savable and playable on the world's iPods is a little extra work beyond just having them available on a YouTube page. But it's really worth it, especially if you want to be more than last week's news in the grand scheme of things.