>> Hello.  Welcome to the podcast captioning overview, the first in a short series of tutorials on captioning for podcasts, brought to you by Automatic Sync Technologies.  

Podcasts are electronic media that are downloaded, not streamed.  Podcast media is typically either an MP3 or M4A file for audio, or an MOV, M4V or MP4 for video.  Technically the set of devices that could play this media is not really constrained, but more typically these devices fall into two camps, either computers or mobile devices.  On computers you'll find traditional desktop media players such as QuickTime, Windows Media, or Real, or iTunes.  On mobile devices you'll find players like iPod, iPhones, PDAs, etcetera.  

One subtle distinction that we're going to talk about in this tutorial is that you need to caption for the player, not the media itself.  That is the caption technique and the caption file formats are dependent on the player that you're going to be playing back this media.  Captioning support on the computer players is very good, but on the mobile devices it's much more variable, and is often not supported at all.  

We're going to talk about a couple different ways of captioning for podcast material. There are many different ways to approach this, but we're going to focus on three.  The first option is to state that you're going to support captioning only for the desktop players.  The second option is to open caption your video, that is burn the captions right into the video and not leave the user with any ability to turn it off, on or off.  And finally, you can caption specifically for Apple devices, such as iPod, iTunes, and QuickTime.  We're going to talk about all three of these in more detail.  

The first option is to support desktop players only.  Computer players such as iTunes, Flash, Windows Media, or QuickTime all have terrific support for captioning.  iTunes and QuickTime in particular support all of the typical media formats that are used for podcasts.  While this solution is very simple, it excludes support for mobile devices.  We're not going to talk about this solution in great detail, there are numerous other video, tutorial videos on AST's website that walk you through how to do this.  We're going to focus more on the options that do provide support for the mobile players.  

The first such option is open captioning.  In open captioning, you force the captions onto the screen so that they are always visible, they become part of the video signal.  The advantage to this is that you don't require any captioning support by the playback device, so therefore these captions are inherently supported by any device that can display video.  There are two disadvantages however.  The user cannot control the captions, turn them on or off, and the production process is slightly more complex.  

The other option is to caption specifically for the Apple devices.  iPod, iTunes, and QuickTime players represent the largest share of podcast playback devices out there, and Apple has recently announced specific captioning support for all of these devices.  The new Apple caption support is available for QuickTime, iTunes, all three current versions of iPod, and the iPhone.  When you're captioning specifically for Apple devices, once you get your caption files for your video, you need to insert them into your M4V file for these devices.  There are two ways to accomplish this.  The official way is to use Apple's Compressor 3 product to insert the captions.  But there's also a way to do it using QuickTime Pro with a special plug-in.  

In this tutorial series we're going to walk you through a few important steps.  First of all, how to obtain the caption files in the first place, then we'll show you how to open caption your video for podcast devices.  Then we'll show you how to caption specifically for Apple devices using Compressor 3, and then using QuickTime Pro.  I hope you find this information useful.