Nokia Podcasting available, works with videocasts too

Nokia’s Podcasting application (limited to podcatching at the moment) is out in beta, for Nokia N91 & all the other S60 3rd Edition devices. WLAN or flat-rate data plan is highly recommended.

Although it’s marketed primarily to listen audio podcasts nothing prevents subscribing to vodcasts as well. The problem with video feeds is that not all of them are formatted to be playable on mobile phones (or multimedia computers). Nokia Podcasting does a good job of trying to check the video before downloading, hence saving the trouble from the user. Even if there would be a problem viewing the video on the device, there is still the choice to download (and “sideload” to PC for watching). There is also a handy option to preview the video while it’s still being downloaded.

In my experience surprisingly many of the vodcasts out there work, but there is really no way of telling before trying. For producers of videocasts, I have a few “lowest common denominators” to enable most of the 3rd Edition devices:
- MPEG-4 SP video
- AAC-LC audio
- 3GP or MP4 file format
- CIF resolution (352×288)
- max 512kbps bitrate
- max 15fps framerate
(NB. This leaves out Nokia 3250, 5500 and E50 since they don’t support MPEG-4)

It’s beta stuff, so any comments are highly welcome!

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Updated 19.6.2006:
Re-wrote most of the post, after checking with the final version. Sorry about that.

-Jukka