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Let’s stick with the standards for video podcasts

April 12th, 2007

Apple has released a specification for video podcasts and has sent emails to content creators to help them make their content look good on AppleTV. They advise people to use Quicktime’s “export to iPod” to insure that the content will work on an iPod. They say that this “results in an M4V file” that will lead some to assume that this is a requirement for playback on AppleTV.

This is not the case at this time. The Scobleshow feed uses .mp4 files instead and it plays well on AppleTV. My point is that people should use the industry standard .mp4 file format rather than the Apple-specific .m4v format.

Here are the video podcast specifications that I recommend:

H.264 video, 1.5 Mbps, 640 x 480 (640×360 if you can do 16:9 aspect instead), 30 frames per sec., Baseline Low-Complexity Profile with AAC-LC audio at 160 kbps, 48 Khz, stereo audio in .mp4 file format

Please let me know if you have a podcast with this specification. I would love to test it.

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