Start a Videocast
Use your camcorder and some inexpensive editing and compression tools to build movies to add to your blog.
Creating a videocast is very similar to creating a podcast. The same mechanism—the enclosure [Hack #37] —is used to distribute the videocast as in the podcast. So, once you create a video file for syndication, you upload and publish it in the same way as you publish a podcast. The attributes in the enclosure element are the same as well. Easy? Not so fast! While the format for audio files in a podcast is fairly standardized, the video in a videocast is not. A wide variety of video formats and encoding parameters are available. The major components to choosing a format are the video compression codec, video bit rate, video frame rate, audio compression codec, audio sample rate, and audio bit rate. In some cases, it is useful to calculate the total bit rate (audio plus video) as well.
The Source Format
Your source format will depend on the equipment you have or can obtain. Probably the highest convenient quality for most people is a video camera with FireWire—also called iLink (Sony), or IEEE-1394. Since many computers are coming with FireWire jacks in them, with the right software this can be a very convenient method to get your video into your computer (some cameras come with Universal Serial Bus [USB] as well, or you can get a FireWire add-on adapter). Once the video is in your computer, you can edit it if necessary and convert it to a format suitable to your ...
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