Podcasting & Vlogging: Part One

[PodcastVlogrsswidget]

Some people will mingle that podcasting and video blogging (vlogging) is the same. What is  erroneous. Though, they somehow have similar properties, they are not the same.
Video blog: Instead of, like most commonly blogs, wich are textual, writing, you rather make a video, then write a short description of its content and put it next to the video. Still your visitors will beable to leave comments as usual. Video blogs also called Vlogs are built by many people from videos they shoot , typically whit a digital video camera, for best quality and traditionnal blogs. Video blogs are used by both professionals and amateurs.
The process is you shoot the video,upload it into your computer,then to your webserver or the host of your video blog. Write the short description,use a code(there are many diferente) to display the video on your blog.
The file formats to use, depend largely on how big the video file is, the player that you are using the call the videoon the server, and of course on your personal preference.
There are two ways to display these videos,either the basic way or usingstreaming.

• MPEG-4 and its derivatives(H.264, XviD and DviX)
• 3 gr for mobile phones
• Macromedia Flash (.flv for streaming )

Podcasting find its origin in the advent of Web.2 and particularly in the development of technology like RSS. But,differently to the Vlogging,it is only an audio file that is available via RSS.In the other hand, vodcasts have also emarged. By defintion, vodcast is a video podcast. By the way, there a great debate as wether or not vodcast is the same to vlog. But as I said, it is not.

There are two maitn actors:

• The ones who search for these audio and video files
• and the ones who publish those.

Podcasting uses RSS to add in addition to the audio or video contents descriptive data and metadata related to the files(Labels ID3 for the MP3s), some datas like the date, the title, a summary,links, pictures. Advanced foncionalities are available on the files whit formats MPEG-4. And there exist various extensions of file, introduced by apple.

Distinguish these different formats:

• .mp4: the official extension of the format MPEG-4
• .m4a announces an audio file MPEG-4 (a as audio)
• .m4b announces a MPEG-4 file chapter (b as bookmark)
• .m4p announces a MPEG-4 protected file(p as protected)
• .m4v annouces a MPEG-4 vidéo file (v as video)

Stay tune for the coming part…