Goodbye from him and it’s goodbye from me – to my room, the philosophy bench, the Garfield posters, to the evil anglepoise lamps, the brandy butter stains, and my childhood.

Video Podcast version (MP4 – 58Mb)

Incidental, coincidental, and purely mental music used:
The Knife – Marble House (PTR remix)
Dubstar – Stars

Everything must go from the ‘Write a Sequel, Secret 7! to the secret condom stash, to the Piggybank-to-eleven and the Horace and the Spiders from Mars, and the Clip Art Monster from Freehand 4!

Also features Tim and Kirk in: ‘Landfill or Maybe!’ a humourous look at Tim’s terrible cassingle collection!

Video podcast (MP4, 58Mb)

Incidental, coincidental, and purely mental music used:
Manic Street Preachers – Everything Must Go
SFX – Lemmings
Electroset – How Does it Feel?
Various ska/dance tracks

(I really recommend you watch the High Quality by clicking on the video and going to the YouTube page if you can)

In which our intrepid heroes produce the Rough Guide to Beacon Hill, not with Sank-her Goo-her or Magenta DevineTime but the infinitely cheaper Kirk and Tim. We also go to the Chinese Great Wall – no expense spared. All because I love* Beacon Hill so much!

Also take a trip around my home town, it’s the greatest town around, it’s a city (well village) of pain, it’s one big factory! (apols. to Mark Mothersbaugh)

Podcast version (MP4 – 58Mb)

* sentence may include traces of sarcasm. Please see a doctor immediately if allergic.

Incidental, coincidental, and purely mental music used:
Super Furry Animals – Hometown Unicorn
Felix – It Will Make Me Crazy (big mix)
Mark Mothersbaugh – My Home Town
Richard Hawley – Long Way Home

hometown unicorns - by Kirk and Tim -beam me out of here! it's a dump!

(I really recommend you watch the High Quality by clicking on the video and going to the YouTube page if you can)

Kirk and I learn the secret of the poetry cat; that it’s a big house a very big house in the country; Chocky appears in a dodgy video effect; and then we go all Jackanory and find that I wrote Tarantino stories when I was wee.

Podcast version (62Mb)

Incidental, coincidental, and purely mental music used:
Blur – Country House
S’Express – Mantra for a State of Mind (Club mix)
Kate Bush – Under the Ivy
Super Furry Animals – At Least it’s Not the End of the World

Redlands Silly point - taken by Kirk

OK you techno-g33kz out there can help me – I have been creating video podcasts but having nothing but problems, because although if you follow Apple’s specs for video that will play on an iPod, it still won’t work depending on what software you use (does this sound familiar? And people wonder why I have a dislike for Apple – it’s like QT Pro encoding, it runs really fast if you upgrade to Pro, and use their presets – yet runs slow even then encoding from other programs..hmm).

Sadly the best encoder I don’t have a copy of *ahem* and is really really slow – the first video podcast I did was created using the rough n’ready export function of After Effects – really slow, needs literally 10′s of Gbs of space otherwise it balks out, but weirdly the most compliant. How odd).

Anyway as I don’t have a video iPod or Zune I’d be really grateful if some of youse fling these files at them and see what happens (and yes surprisingly Zune does mp4 and m4v, at spookily the same specs LOL).

And can you let me know what iTunes (if you use that) says if you (right) click and say ‘Convert for iPod’ whether it says ‘No conversion needed’ or tries to do so, and if the original file works regardless.

Video podcast – encoded by QT Pro, Mp4

Video podcast encoded for iPhone, m4v

Video podcast encoded by Videora – 5G iPod, 320×240

I won’t include the iTunes created version. It seems to think everyone wants a m4v file at 640×480 HQ at 110Mbs. Nice. Thank you Apple for your bloat-friendly AppleTV-stealth-supporting specs. I’ll let you know when I win the lottery and can afford the bandwidth/file storage, mmmkay?

Thanks in advance – I’m this close actually dropping support for downloads/devices and going YouTube only, ironically that’s far easier, unless I can find a solution.

And they wonder why video podcasts didn’t take off like YouTube? I think their answer is right here in this post….

EDIT: I think I partly worked it out – strangely old MPEG-4s seem to not need being recoded – looks like only certain sizes or certain types (?) of H264 files are supported, but I’m still interested whether the iPhone ones work with iPods too. The first one should be the most compatible – or is it?

And yes those of you who’ve had problems playing it on your iPod try that one – it’s a new (not H264) version.