As things are heating up in the Podcasts at Penn State project more and more faculty are starting to create podcasts for the fall semester. Chris Millet has been spending an hour with all the faculty who request a consultation and many times these meetings end with a trip to the Faculty Multimedia Center within ETS. The FMC has already started working with a handful of faculty to create some great content … most of it so far has been created using ProfCast so the audio syncs with the slides from PowerPoint or Keynote. The faculty are excited and other than a few very small issues with software and hardware the FMC team is happy with the results.
One thing we are really starting to notice as a major drawback to iTunes is its inability to play an enhanced podcast the way we think it should. Everything plays great on screen, the chapters work, and you can watch the slides update in the tiny little album artwork window. That last point is the kicker … first of all that window is so small it isn’t worth looking at slides on it … if you do resize it you end up altering the way most people really use iTunes the other 18 hours or so a day. Apple lets you click the window and get a nice fullsize view … great, other than it does not refresh with the podcast. This is putting us in a little bit of a bind.
One of our primary goals from the get go was cross platform playback (no iPod required) … we thought iTunes is a cross platform tool so we’d be in great shape … the fact that a student cannot sit down and listen and watch an enhanced podcast on their machine is crazy. We need to have that artwork refresh. Chris and I are even discussing what it would take to create our own player … sounds like a real pain. Has anyone found a work around for this feature?
test test. check check…
Is this thing on?
It seems to be now … D’Arcy was getting kicked out in Safari, but I was OK. If anyone else commented here I’d know for sure … if you aren’t getting through email me istcole at mac dot com and let me know. Thanks!
The Quicktime-Player has the ability to play enhanced podcasts. You can easily add your podcast to html, like this:
Check out:
http://breeze.et.fh-osnabrueck.de:2222/tutorial/vls_drm.htm
Do you know of a possibility to create pictures of keynote slides and get the xml-file for the podcast except of profcast ? Or is it possible to edit the enhanced podcast ?
With ProfCast it has the option of sending your enhanced podcast to GaragBand for editing. IT is a great feature. No idea on the XML piece.
A viable solution is a QTL link file. That way, you can continue to distribute new episodes via a podcast subscrription and also serve full-screen playback via a hyperlink.
See: http://www.ashs.org/resources/videoworkshopseries.html
Hope this helps.
This is finally fixed in iTunes 7.
Now, if only it was possible to get an enhanced podcast to use the whole ipod window, rather than displaying the images in a box which is less than full screen height.