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Video Podcasts Supported in iTunes 5

Thursday, September 15th, 2005 at 11:45 AM - by

Apple Computer has quietly added support for video podcasts in iTunes 5, the latest version of the software. The Wall Street Journal reported the feature Thursday, and noted that the ability to include links to videos to the Podcast Directory was added earlier this year. In iTunes 5, however, iTunes users can actually subscribe to and access those video podcasts.

One such example is City Magazine TV, a New York-based blog that has added short video clips to its repertoire. Clicking on one of the video episodes results in a download like any other podcast, stored in the podcast listings in iTunes. Clicking on that episode within iTunes opens up a separate window that plays the video.

According to the WSJ article, and our own searches, the few video podcasts that are currently available trend towards the amateur side. As it did with audio podcasts, however, Apple's support for the medium could propel the concept to legitimacy more swiftly than it would have otherwise.

This news also begs the obvious question of whether a video iPod could be far behind. Apple has so far not announced such a device, but many industry analysts have been predicting its appearance for some time.

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bburrow said:

member since 07 Sep 2005 with 2 posts, unranked, send him a message or view his profile

Thu Sep 15, 2005 12:15 pm

This was already implemented in 4.9. I've been subscribing to Digerati University's video podcasts since 4.9

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gslusher said:

member since 13 Nov 2002 with 2088 posts, unranked, send him a message or view his profile

Thu Sep 15, 2005 6:42 pm

Minor warning: After upgrading to iTunes 5 (OS 10.3.9) and downloading some video podcasts (some call them "vodcasts"), iTunes would crash every time it tried to update my 20GB 3G iPod. I called AppleCare and went through their troubleshooting steps, to no avail. The next thing they suggested was to back up my iTunes Library (easily done on my external FW HD, albeit a bit slow with about 15 GB in the library), then delete everything related to iTunes and start over. If the app worked with the iPod with nothing in the library, then add stuff back, bit by bit, to see what was causing the problem.

Before I did that, though, I looked at the library sorted by date added and noted the video podcasts. When I deleted those, iTunes updated the iPod without a hitch. I then got ONE video podcast and tried updating the iPod. It worked, and gave me a message that it couldn't load the video podcast on the iPod. That, apparently, is what it is supposed to do.

If anyone has similar problems, try deleting the video podcasts (you can certainly back them up, first). It can also help to ditch the iTunes preferences.

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