See Also: How_to_Record_Podcasts - How_to_Create_Blog_Entries_for_Podcasts

Prerequisites: Amazon S3, HeyWatch.com Accounts

These instructions assume that you'll be generating Flash videos to display on your site using the online video conversion services at HeyWatch.com. They charge $50 for 500 video encodes. If you've got another way of generating FLV videos, you can do that. We recommend HeyWatch just because it's easy and fast - the video encoding is done in the cloud very quickly without installing any software on your machine.

These instructions also assume that you'll be hosting the videos on Amazon S3, an internet file hosting service. You can't usually upload videos directly to your blog because they're too large. Amazon S3 charges you based on how much you upload/download and how much you store on the service. For most podcasters, this will only be a few dollars per month. To upload files to Amazon S3, we recommend the free S3 Organizer plugin for Firefox.

Quest employees who want to encode video or host it can get login credentials from Brent Ozar.

Get the Podcast From The Author

When someone creates a video podcast for distribution, it will be too large to email back and forth. Instead, have them go to http://www.filedropper.com/ or http://drop.io and upload it there. They'll get an email link to the file, and they can send that link to you. You can download the original podcast to your local computer for processing.

When you get the file, change the name to match our naming standard. Here's an example:

SQLServerPedia-20081211-DMVs.mov

• SQLServerPedia - we start with this to identify which site it belongs to (could also be QuestKB or your site's name)
• 20081211 - the date in eight-character format.
• DMVs - a short description of the show topic, one word or less, no spaces or symbols.
• mov - the extension. Don't change that part - it may be in another format like WMV or AVI, but whatever it is, leave it for now. Pick the section below that corresponds to the type of source file you'd like to convert. (As of 1/2009, the only instructions are for MOV files because that's what Brent produces.)

Creating a Flash Video

When the source file is a Quicktime movie in MOV format, here's the encoding steps:

Create an Image Thumbnail

Optional Steps for Real Podcasts

Creating an Audio-Only MP3 Version

Open Audio Hijack Pro. Choose Quicktime Player as the input application, check the box to open a url/file, and click the Select button to choose your input file. Pick the original source MOV file.

In the Recording tab, choose "For internet distribution (high), choose your output folder, and put in your output file name.

Click Hijack, and Quicktime Pro will open. In Audio Hijack Pro, click Record, and then in Quicktime Pro, click Play. It'll capture the podcast audio, and when the podcast is done playing, you can close Quicktime, click Hijack on Audio Hijack Pro to stop the hijacking, and close Audio Hijack Pro.

While Audio Hijack Pro works, now would be an excellent time to listen to the podcast and come up with the one-paragraph description and blog entry to be used later. You can jump ahead to the "Write the Blog Entry" section and work on that while the audio portion records, but you can also keep going with these instructions - multiple things can run simultaneously until we get to a certain point below, and I'll make a note of that.

After Audio Hijack Pro finishes, you'll have an MP3 file. On the podcasts Brent does, he takes that file, imports it into Garage Band, and adds the intro and fadeout clips. You don't have to do that - at some point in the future, Brent will build a standard intro clip and fadeout clip to make that process easier.

Encoding the MP4 and WMV Podcasts

Open Handbrake. It will automatically ask for a source file, and point it at your MOV source file.

On the Preset window on the right side, click iPod Low-Rez and make sure the Web Optimized button is not checked.

Click the Browse button next to Destination, and choose where you want to export the file. Use the naming standards we mentioned earlier, and manually type in the .MP4 file extension instead of the default MOV.

Click the Add to Queue button. We've now added one podcast to the encoding queue.

Now we need to add the web-playable version for browser viewing. Click the Web Optimized checkbox, and click the Browse button next to File Destination. Use the same file name as we just used, but append Web to the file name, like SQLServerPedia-20081211-DMVsWeb.mp4.

Click the Add to Queue button. We now have two files in the queue. Click Show Queue, verify that there are two encodes pending, and click Start. Your computer will be slow while this runs, but you can do other things. It may take as long as twice the runtime of the podcast or more, depending on how slow your computer is.

Note - if you're still capturing audio with Audio Hijack Pro, you can't go on to the next step below until you're done with Audio Hijack Pro.

Open QuickTime Pro, and open our MOV source file. Click File, Export. In the Export dropdown, pick "Movie to Windows Media" and click the Options button. Click on the Content tab, and enter the Title, Author Description and Copyright:

• Title - a 3-5 word title.
• Author - the interviewer or narrator.
• Description - a paragraph-long description. Can be much longer than the window shows.
• Copyright - Copyright 2009, Quest Software, Inc. All rights reserved.

Click OK, and in the file name box, put in the file name to export, making sure the file extension is WMV. Click Export, and this will take some time - as long as the runtime of the podcast, depending on how slow your computer is.

Adding File Information to Podcasts

Drag each podcast into iTunes and watch a few seconds to make sure everything looks OK. Brent also tests it by syncing the file to his iPhone and verifying that it works. The Web.mp4 version of the file won't play on an iPod/iPhone, but the other MP4 one should.

Right-click on each file and add the following information:

Info tab:

• Name - the 3-5 word name of the podcast. Should not include SQLServerPedia.
• Artist - the narrator or speaker.
• Year - today's year.
• Album - SQLServerPedia
• Comments - the paragraph-long description
• Genre - Podcast

Video tab:

• Show - SQLServerPedia
• Season Number - today's year
• Description - the paragraph-long description

Click OK, and you can remove the podcasts from iTunes.

Upload the Files to Amazon S3

Open Firefox and click Tools, S3 Organizer. (We don't include the Amazon S3 authentication here in the instructions.)

Double-click on the tutorials.sqlserverpedia.com or tutorials.questkb.com bucket (wherever you're going to host the podcast) at the top right and it should list the existing podcasts.

In the left window, navigate to your local folder where you've got the webcasts. Highlight them and click on the upload button (the folder with the right arrow).

After the uploads finish, right-click your newly uploaded files and click Edit ACLs button. Change the "Everyone Read" item to be a checkmark and hit OK. That gives the public the ability to download the files.

Next Step: How_to_Create_Blog_Entries_for_Podcasts