After receiving several reports that Emerging Tech Talk #34 would not display on an iPhone, I did some digging and discovered that the issue was that I exported the video out of iMovie ’09 as the “Large” size of 720×540. Why I did that, I can’t tell you… the Share->Movie screen is very clear that the Large size will not work on iPhones or iPods:

I exported the movie again in the “Medium” size of 640×480, which is what I’ve normally done, and then uploaded it to the server again. This seems to have fixed the issue. I tested on my iPhone and I could download and view this movie.

I don’t know if there will be any caching issues you all may see with iTunes or whatever your podcatcher is, but the new video is up there and is at the identical URL to the previous file.

And yes, astute observers will note that in theory the Medium version shouldn’t work on the iPhone – according to iMovie ’09 – but it always has before. Methinks Apple needs to update that screen.

Would you like to join a public chat room to provide feedback on Emerging Tech Talk shows? Or to suggest new topics? Or to just chat about topics I cover in the show?

Since I’m a heavy Skype user on a daily basis, I decided to start up a public chat for this show. If you also use Skype, you can join the ETT public chat simply by clicking this link.

You will also see this box in the second sidebar now where you can join:

I’m not sure, quite frankly, what type of traffic we’ll see in the public chat, but I thought it could be a useful experiment…. and I’m open to your suggestions as to how we might use it.

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Technorati Tags: danyork, emergingtechtalk, ett, skype

In case you are wondering, I am working on how to make this Emerging Tech Talk show available as a video “podcast” that you can subscribe to and download into a media player like iTunes or a device like an iPod or iPhone. The challenge is that I also want the videos to be searchable and findable in YouTube. It’s also insanely simple to upload videos to YouTube from within iMovie ’08 – and I’m trying to do this show with as little overhead and process as possible.

I looked into seeing if I could simply subscribe to the YouTube “channel” via iTunes, but that doesn’t work for a couple of reasons. First, the YouTube ‘voxeovideos’ channel feed isn’t in a form that iTunes seems t be able to recognize. Second – and more importantly – the videos on YouTube are all in Flash video format, whereas iTunes/iPod/iPhone all need the m4v format.

So it would seem that I need to host the videos elsewhere in the appropriate iTunes/iPod/iPhone format and then also upload them to YouTube. I can obviously host them on our site – and I may do that – but we’re not really set up as a video streaming/download site. Yes, I can find a WordPress plugin, and that is an option. I’ve also looked at blip.tv in the past and it seems a range of similar services have emerged over the past couple of years. The question really is for any of those sites what their intellectual property license is like (a.k.a. Terms of Service) and whether or not they allow companies to upload videos. There is also admittedly a cost factor, i.e. do they charge and if so how much?

So that’s the scoop… probably next week after US Thanksgiving I’ll dig into it a bit more… if any of you reading this have any ideas that you care to leave in the comments, they are certainly appreciated.

Fun, fun, fun…