Quick Start for Podcatchers

  1. You can publish portions of your media library and subscribe to them via podcast managers like Juice (formerly known as iPodder), iTunes or another installation of TVersity. The first thing you need to do is decide what portion of your media library you wish to publish. Let’s assume you have a folder with videos of your kids that you wish to share with your parents, we will show you how to subscribe to this folder from iTunes and have it kept in synch with an iPod (all the necessary conversions between the file format produced by your camcorder and the format an iPod can handle will be taken care of in this process with very little effort).
  2. Assuming this folder was shared already via TVersity (as explained above) you should browse your media library in a web browser (via http://localhost:41952/) and navigate to the relevant folder. Right click on the RSS button and select from the menu Copy Link Location on Firefox or Copy Shortcut on Microsoft Internet Explorer.
  3. Open iTunes, go to the Advanced menu and select Subscribe to Podcast. In the windows that opened, paste the RSS URL you copied from the web browser and click ok.
  4. iTunes now shows this folder in the Podcast section and will start downloading the first video. In order to make sure that these videos can be played in iTunes, TVersity converts those videos if necessary to a compatible format (this feature is currently not working correctly - only audio items will be converted correctly for iTunes).
  5. You can now play this video via iTunes and as you add new videos to the folder they will automatically be added to iTunes as well.
  6. If you wish to synchronize these videos with an iPod, you will need to have iTunes convert them to an iPod friendly format by selecting these videos, going to the Advance menu and selecting Convert(iTunes version 6.04 is needed for video conversion). On your next iPod synchronization the videos will be added and made available for playback.
  7. In a similar way you can also synchronize audio files with the iPod, without worrying about their original format. TVersity will convert almost any existing audio format (including FLAC, Wavpack, Ogg Vorbis and many more) to mp3 on the fly while iTunes is downloading your files.
  8. If you would like to use a remote installation of iTunes, it is recommended to first establish a VPN between your home network and the receiver’s home network and then email your RSS feed URL to the receiver (replacing the localhost with the IP address of your computer on the VPN). Once the RSS URL is available the receiver needs to follow the same exact procedure as described above, to subscribe to it. If you can’t or do not wish to establish a VPN using your firewall, you can use a free service likehamachi. Alternatively you can open the TVersity port (41952) on your router/firewall for incoming connections and use your public IP address or a dynamic DNS instead of the localhost in the RSS URL. Step by step instructions for the setup of port forwarding with a specific router make and model, are available at portforward.com.
  9. Instead of using iTunes, you can subscribe to the RSS feed from a remote installation of TVersity, this will allow the receiver to access the published media from their networked device of choice. TVersity, unlike most Podcast managers, will not only add new media as it becomes available on the RSS feed, but it will also remove media when it is removed from the feed, essentially synchronizing the relevant portion of the media library between the two sites. In addition to that TVersity allows you to synchronize not only audio and video feeds (as in iTunes) but also image feeds.
  10. Congratulations! You have successfully installed the server and used it to syncrhonize media with iTunes, with the iPod and with a remote installation of TVersity.