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Podcasting Crib Notes - A Handy Media File Format Table

I just published a new white paper called, "Audio and Video Podcasting Standards: Making sense of disparate RSS audio/video media formats, media players, podcast receivers, and digital rights management solutions." Long title, I know.

The whitepaper is available in our Resources section. Click here to download it.

I wrote the paper because there is so much confusion about which formats are supported on which platforms. Audio and video is really the last bastion on unadulterated propriety on the Internet. It is a lose/lose/lose situation. Media player providers lose because they have less marketshare at a higher price, users lock their content into non-transferable file formats, and publishers cannot support every file type for every platform. Now throw in three syndication standards for podcasts (iTunes, RSS 2.0 and ATOM), it is an ugly mess.

When developing the Ingeniux PodXite media publishing solution we expressly addressed the standards issues. PodXite provides a middleware layer that can render any flavor or XML, RSS or HTML and transcode audio and video to a wide variety of media formats. It simplifies the media management process for our customers by allowing them to manage just one version of the media content that includes all of the meta data and file formats.

When researching media standards and platforms I could not find one listing that showed which file formats are supported on which platforms. So I made one. I cannot guarantee this is 100% accurate, it is fast moving space, but it is fairly complete. Please feel free to reference in your own projects:

Platform and Site Support for Media Formats

The following table outlines supported formats for leading media platforms and Web sites.

Notes

Protected ACC files are encoded with Apple Fairplay Digital Rights Management encryption, limiting their ability to be copied. Only Apple can use Fairplay - it is not open to other publishers

Posted by David Hillis