How do i get my YouTube video podcast to appear in my iTunes RSS feed?

You cannot use YouTube videos in iTunes. Videos must be in one of the following specific formats: .m4v, .mov or .mp4 (not Flash, Realvideo or WMV). The files in the Ricky Gervais podcast are mp4. The files can be hosted on an ordinary web server though it needs to be capable of handling 'byte range requests', something you would need to check with the people running it.

YouTube videos aren't readily available for download, that's why they're unusable with a podcast feed for iTunes. As Roger has explained - you'll need properly formatted video files hosted on a proper server, along with an iTunes-compatible RSS feed to get your videos into the iTunes Store.

None of the services you list is a good idea, though people have managed to get Amazon to work - though there have also been lots of problems with it and I wouldn't recommend it. Most free services aren't really suitable, though SoundCloud can work up to a point. The best solution, though it has to be paid for, is proper webspace hosting: there are a lot of firms offering this - GoDaddy is good.

Libsyn.com supports - Video, Audio and PDF's for podcasting and is an easy solution for hosting and RSS feed generation where you are looking for multiple media formats.

Regards

Rob W

libsyn

richle wrote:

Although the advice podcast creators always give is that 'regular web hosting' sites aren't any good.

I don't know why they should say this. I've never made a video podcast, but I've used Godaddy for my audio podcast without any problems at all and any competent webspace hosting service should be fine - I don't see why video should be any different. You would still have to make the feed, and services such as Libsyn give you the full service including creating the feed. I don't know about Soundcloud but by its name I suppose it doesn't handle video.

I can help you rectify that mistake 🙂 just email me rob at libsyn dot com - I have a tutorial to easily help you move over from soundcloud and keep your audience. Libsyn is actually designed from the ground up for Podcasters and what is used by more of the big name producers.

Regards,

Rob W

libsyn

richle wrote:

http://www.smartpassiveincome.com/how-to-start-a-podcast-podcasting-tutorial/ and in particular his tutorial (video) on content hosting.

Clearly he's not a techie, but he is well-respected for how he explains the whole thing, and doing quite nicely out of it all. He has some cred ;-)

I've only looked briefly at his page: mostly it seems OK though I would quibble with one or two points. As regards hosting, the point he is making is that if you get popular it will consume a lot of bandwidth, so you need a service which can handle this - which is true enough. He suggests that hosting on the same server as your main website might result in that being affected by heavy bandwidth consumption of the podcast media, rather than suggesting that webspace hosting per se isn't suitable. if you subscribe to a service which can handle a large bandwidth this wouldn't be a problem; but the real issue here is that the popular free hosting services such as Google Drive or Dropbox are simply not up to handling podcast media: both have caused innumerable problems complained about here.

I don't know about Vimeo but I would have thought that like YouTube it simply provides embedded players, not a format which iTunes can read.

richle wrote:

...used by the Australian Broadcasting Corp., which was one of the final ticks for me - doesn't get much better endorsement in Aus. than that.

Unless you count Hamish and Andy - whom do host with libsyn. 🙂

So can you give me the names of any 'proper servers' -- the ones with 'byte range requests'?

http://www.blubrry.com/ has all the tools you need to host your media files and publish them to iTunes, etc. e-Mail me: shawn(at)blubrry.com and I can give you a code to try the service free for a month.

I wonder if Vimeo can offer that? Or Dropbox even... Or does it need to be something more along the lines of an Amazon Server Cloud service or something.

Vimeo doesn't offer any publicly available downloading services, and you will need that in order to get into iTunes. Dropbox/Google Drive aren't designed to be used as CDN's and even if you can get them to work at first, they will eventually fail. Some people use Amazon services to deliver media. At first, it's OK because the cost is low but it doesn't usually scale with audience growth. Eventually, you'll be paying more to deliver that media than you would using a dedicated media hosting company.

Presumably then, whatever hit-count they're getting for the Gervais show on YouTube has no correlation to the viewers they're getting on iTunes, as they're being hosted in completely different places.

That's true. The stats on YouTube and the stats generated thru iTunes and other downloads would be separate. Blubrry provides stats for any traffic you receive thru the service.