Viddler

I know Viddler is the coolest place to watch videos, but I like the way that STeaP has a podcast feed as well so I can subscribe in iTunes and watch the show on the teevee. It seems to take quite a while longer for the podcast to show up than it does for the Viddler episodes to show up, though. I'm not complaining; I know how much work it must be to put everything together. I'm just curious whether that's because it takes longer to encode everything, or if maybe you don't think anybody uses the iPod feed in which case I'm at least saying "hey, I use the iPod feed". So anyway. Keep on STeaPing.

There is encoding time that factors in here. I usually edit on Sunday and encode on Monday. I run the viddler encode first and then upload that and tag it. After tagging, I then upload the ipod and vodcast versions to my host, which takes a while. Then later in the afternoon I update the RSS feeds and all is live at that point.

The problem is, I'm also "working", so doing all this on Monday during breaks. I will always make sure everything is up by Tuesday, which is my real goal, but I do try to get things updated as soon as possible. I'm going to look into streamlining the RSS updates, so that may help a little.

Also, how do we look on the big screen? Would you take a slightly larger file size for better compression, or do we look good as it is? Let us know!

I watch it via AppleTV on a 40" screen, and it looks pretty good as-is. And that's the iPod version (just in case I want to take STeaP to go). I'm not excessively picky when it comes to Internet video - I'd rather have a heavily compressed but interesting show than more of the high-definition pablum the networks rain down from above.

I used the Viddler download link to grab your original 350MB 720x480 mp4 file and it played just great on the AppleTV. Is that the same file you use for the MP4 feed? If you can spare the bandwidth it might be easier to just use the same file you send to Viddler since it seems to be compatible.

One last non-tea-related video compression comment: I recently got myself an ElGato turbo.264. It does a nice job of speeding up the compression, although it doesn't yet work with the new iMovie '08, and it provides much less control over the process. Still, for standard AppleTV/iPod presets, it does a nice job. If you're using a Mac, anyway.

I think Joe is editing in Linux though, but good information to have.

I love that someone out there is watching our show on an actual TV! How friggin cool. :) I have little to do with the uploading business, but I wanted to just voice my excitement that you're watching and liking it and subscribing on iTunes and whatnot. Really cool. :)