Creating a video podcast for free

With all the tools and integrations to get video online (youTube, mobileMe, Posterous), you’d think that it would be pretty straightforward to create a video podcast. It took me a little while to figure it all out. Here’s how I did it.

1.       Create a Posterous account

2.       Email your movie to posterous.  This is cool because you can set it up to go to lots of services at once.  So by sending it to posterous, it could get submitted to youtube, vimeo, and be hosted as a .mov for iphone and podcasting. They use amazon storage to store the movie so hosting is free (at least up to 1GB right now). 

3.       Use Podcast blaster to create an xml file with the new episode information. It will keep your information so adding episodes is easy. I still think it could auto populate the length and duration fields, but oh well.  When you get to the episode url, go to your posterous page, find the download link for the .mov file and use that URL.

4.       Upload the XML file to your website. I hosted it at Google docs, which seems to work ok. I was worried about google docs being blocked on  some corporate intranets but I think it should be fine as long as iTunes can access the file

5.        Submit a Podcast to iTunes. Use the URL to the xml file you just uploaded. You only need to do this step once. After iTunes approves it, your podcast can be found iTunes. iTunes checks the xml file about once a day for new content.

Some additional notes:

·         If you just want to create an audio podcast, you can skip steps 3 and 4 and just submit your rss for your posterous blog (http://yourname.posterous.com/rss) to iTunes. Posterous supports podcast formatting of your rss with audio but for some reason not video.

·         There are many options for what format your video could be in. I didn’t test extensively with posterous to see if it always hosts videos in a podcast compatible format.

·         Movie size will likely be limited by your email provider.  Posterous limits you to movies of 100MB if you post by web. If your movies are bigger than that, you may have to find another hosting solution.

Here’s the one I created: http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/crossfit-initiative/id402341737