A couple of days ago, I was asked, again, to download more Teachers TV programmes for staff at work. I don’t mind doing it, and it doesn’t take long, but I did wonder if there was a way of automatically downloading them.¬¨‚Ć Looking on the site, it seems they publish all new videos in a podcast. You can find out more about that here.
So I fired up iTunes, and subscribed to the new videos RSS feed. And then the problems began.
It seems that, in their infinite (lack of) wisdom, Teachers TV publish their videos (in the feed at least) in WMV format, not the more podcast-receiver-friendly MP4 or MOV formats. iTunes doesn’t like, or even see, WMV media in RSS feeds. I found some stuff on the internet about installing Flip4Mac (I’m using a PC for this task, so it’s irrelevant – and doesn’t work for this process anyway), or parsing the feed through something else, renaming the files to .mov on the fly, which, frankly, is too complicated.
Juice, another podcast receiver, was also of no help. It fires iTunes up every time you try and refresh a feed, so I suspect it’s tied into iTunes, and as a result can’t see WMV files either.
Thankfully, I then found Ziepod.
And look! It works! Not only can it see the WMV files, I can also configure it so that it renames the useless “C2976001_multi.wmv” filenames to match the title of the video (“KS3 Cross Curricular – Bath Bombs and Rockets.wmv” in this case) automatically, and store the files on a network share in a folder where everyone can pick them up. No more downloading programmes for me!
As it turns out, the WMV files from Teachers TV are actually a kind of playlist stub. They’re not the actual videos – just a link to the video stream. Technically, this means I’m not downloading the videos themselves, but since staff can double-click the stub, and it launches the video in a player, this isn’t a problem. In fact, it saves me a huge chunk of hard drive space.
