Podcasts have existed for over six years, and while I have no plans for producing ADS podcasts, I thought that the ADS should at least make the files needed for a podcast but just let people download them manually. I might add that video as well as audio podcasts have existed for over six years, so the ADS is late in providing presentations suitable for mobile devices. I’ve recently upgraded some applications on my computer and see that Apple Compressor can convert video into a couple formats for mobile devices. So I’ve picked a presentation to use as a test.
We’ve recently produced a new presentation named “Show Your Daffodils!” that covers grooming and staging of daffodils. It is available as a DVD (for sale) and a Flash video that you can play from a web server. Both of these have menus and scene indexes as you would see in a commercial movie DVD. As far as I can tell, videos for mobile devices (at least as produced by Apple Compressor) do not support menus; you just get a video to play straight through. Anyway, I’ve taken this new presentation and made a very small (or at least very small for a 53 minute video).mp4 file and a heftier.m4v file. From the.m4v file I made a.3gp file. Using computers but no mobile devices, I found the first two files playable on a Macintosh but not a PC. The.3gp file is playable on a PC. After putting the first two files on a server, I found that different web browsers varied in their capabilities of saving the files on disk. I’ve made a zip archive for each of the three files so you can more reliably save the downloads to disk. I’ve gotten all the files to play with with either QuickTime Player or iTunes on a computer but need to know whether any of them work on a mobile device.
It’s not clear to me what the target devices are for the.mp4 file. The.m4v file is supposed to be for iPhone, iPod, iPad, and Apple TV. The.3gp file is supposed to be for cell phones that can play videos. Support for mobile devices is new to me so I am interested in hearing from people who are willing to test these files so that we can find out how we should really be preparing files for mobile devices. More information about these files and hyperlinks for downloading them are at
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/87784382/ADS_Videos.html
Rather than taking the.mp4 or.m4v files to see if they play upon arrival, I suggest you take the.zip files and play them after you’ve extracted the movie files. (For reliable playing as the data arrives, the Flash version is preferred.) I’ve gotten a couple early reports about low audio volume but the files played loud enough on my computer. Support for mobile devices is new to me, and I can’t test every mobile device, every file format, or every compression parameter, so I am interested in hearing from people who are willing to test these files. I hope that we can make videos that can be distributed from the ADS web site, but if the results of testing show that making the proper files and maintaining the HTML web page is too complex or time consuming, we can instead investigate opening an account at vimeo.com, letting Vimeo reformat the web video files for mobile devices, and having the ADS web site just link to the Vimeo or letting mobile devices stream videos directly from Vimeo.
You’ll notice that this page not only has a hyperlink to the Flash version of “Show Your Daffodils!” that I announced in an earlier Daffnet posting, but it also has a hyperlink the the Flash version of “Let’s Grow Daffodils!” The latter wasn’t installed on the ADS web site as scheduled and advertised in the March 2012 Daffodil Journal, so I also put that Flash movie on this server temporarily. The Flash movies are equally playable on PC and Macintosh with the right Flash player plug-in. I think Android devices can also play Flash videos, but Apple made a decision not to support Flash on their mobile devices. Those of you with Android devices might let me know whether our two Flash movies are playable. Remember that each movie consists of multiple Flash videos, one video for each chapter, so it would indeed be good news if the menu navigation worked.
As it happens, I will be away and not checking e-mail for a while, so don’t worry if I don’t respond to your comments until October.
Kirby Fong 