I’ve been meaning to get into podcasts for a while now as a way to expand my sources and let me pick up more stuff while on the road.  Also, it’s a little more fun, which is one of the biggest biggest advantages I see to podcasting: the presentation of valuable information in a manner that’s a little more social and palatable than black-on-white. (Read on…)

Before I continue, most of you will say “Podcast, so you use iTunes right?” Wrong. Like many open source supporters or Windows users, I find iTunes to not be a viable solution because of many reasons: digital rights policies, resource load, update mechanisms, insistence upon taking over your entire media experience,  and ostensible attitude against interoperability (aka. they don’t like to play nice with others). So let’s just drop it, and if you disagree then I suggest you stop reading now. It will be very frustrating if you think iTunes is the ‘Oracle of the Podcast’.

Regarding video podcasting (loosely defined) the first step into this area was to use the readily available YouTube subscription services.  Of course, you’re taking a pretty big hit in the “available media” department, but you’ve got to start somewhere. Unfortunately, sorting and ordering of these channels is terrible under the current configuration.  All of the subscriptions fall into a single, unruly, unsorted listing.

Also, YouTube’s community isn’t truly podcasting as it doesn’t lend itself to separation of logical flows and the content is as unreliable as the casual user uploader. Even professional providers like Google mixes categories like music@, authors@, women@ and candidates@ in their AtGoogleTalks channel instead  of separating those into separate channels. This disregard for logic or quality uploads  is systematic of this immature and unmotivated community.

The next attempt is to use RSS readers. Common RSS readers are out of the question in this problem because they lack the ability to separate the media from the post. Even with (my favorite) Google Reader‘s starring feature would force you to manually download source files or listen using their online widget. This is fine if you use Reader solely as a podcasts client, but more often than not you’ll find yourself frustrated by the break in continuity between reading and listening/watching.

I then looked at the Windows client options.  For all intents and purposes, Google searching proves there isn’t one.  That is to say that finding any stable podcast client (outside of iTunes) is far from easy in the current climate.  I wandered across Doppler, a small podcast client for Windows with ported versions on the iTouch and iPhone. This alone impressed me.  It was almost perfect, but the interface was buggy and left much to be desired.

At this point I had all but given up. I started surfing Revision3 and looking at what subscription mechanism they used. It looked a lot like Hulu‘s configuration.   It turns out they’re an all-feed shop actually, which is FANTASTIC.  On top of that, they advocate use of a windows tool of which I had never heard: Miro.

My Solution

Miro is a beautiful, elegant podcast client that sells itself as an “HD Video Player”.  In reality, it’s the exact opposite of Doppler: clean, stable, refined, and attractive.  It does just as well with audio podcasts as it does with video. On top of that, it interprets and downloads videos from almost every single media RSS regardless of format (Revision3, Youtube, Veoh, etc).

It also allows for playlist building and addition of sites so you can manually check for updates of your favorite Hulu shows very quickly, although I’ll stick with my Hulu account. Lastly, its a torrent downloader and comes with a link to “LegalTorrents” to get your started downloading videos and music and whatever else you want from that big happy world of P2P (all legal of course).

So live life, friends. Live it with video, music, and speech. Live, and learn, and download Miro. You’ll thank me for it some day.