Using Mac OS X Lion Server

Chapter 7. Building Your Own Podcasting Server

A podcast is a file containing video and/or audio that people view over a network connection. Podcast Producer is Apple’s solution for recording, distributing, and accessing podcasts. Podcast Producer can be linked to iTunes, allowing users a one-stop shop for accessing rich media. Often used in schools and corporate training, Podcast Producer is one of the more elegant solutions for podcasting, using tools built into Mac OS X to make it easier than ever to capture video (which includes screen captures and audio-only podcasts) and distribute the content to users.

While Podcast Producer makes it easier than ever to work with video, it is one of the more complicated services built into Mac OS X Server. Leveraging directory services, web services, grid computing and often mass storage, Podcast Producer has a lot of moving parts. If any part isn’t firing properly, then the whole solution will not function.

There are two ways to set up Podcast Producer. The first is a simple workflow where all podcasts are posted to a website. Once posted, podcasts can be viewed on the website, the feed can be aggregated using RSS (we’ll look a bit more at RSS later in this chapter), or the podcast can be subscribed to and viewed from within iTunes. The second setup for Podcast Producer has all the same options, but comes with few by default. This is a more manual configuration, but allows you to do practically anything you desire (e.g.,, watermarking ...