Sidepodcast

Following up on an earlier post relating to torrent support at Sidepodcast, I figured it might make sense, having covered the reasons for using peer-to-peer technology, to also look at how it works from a user perspective.

Within the past couple of weeks, links to torrent files have been appearing all over this site. You’ll find them beside episode names within the archive pages, in the small panel to the right of audio shows and beneath the transport controls in videos.

In order to use these .torrent files, you’ll need some client software and recently we’ve been getting a lot of mileage out of Vuze. The software runs on Linux, Mac and Windows operating systems and it’s free to download from the homepage.

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We talked briefly on last weeks show about some minor issues we’ve had recently in regards to our bandwidth costs. If you managed to get to the end of that episode we mentioned a spike in traffic led our hosting company, Media Temple, to warn us we could be looking at a bill for $350+ at the end of the month, and then the traffic spiked yet further.

The Price of Fish

As you can imagine, there’s no way we could afford those kind of costs once, let alone on an ongoing basis. The hosting company includes in their grid-service, one terabyte of bandwidth per month and until now that’s suited us just fine. Anything over that though gets billed at more than two dollars per gigabyte and in July we shifted almost double our allocation.

Media Temple do a sterling job of providing us with solid web hosting, the kind that lets us handle 1,600 comments per thread without blinking, but they never claimed to offer infinite bandwidth.

We’ve obviously been testing out a bunch of alternate solutions and amongst them is Amazon S3, which in truth has been a little unreliable of late, but does offer unlimited bandwidth (although it is expensive). More importantly though, S3 acts as a tracker for torrent files as well as a permanent seeder and this is where things get interesting.

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• Length: 04:22 
• Size: 45.9 MB 
• File: rewind2.m4v 
• Transcript: rewind2.pdf 
• Torrent: rewind2.torrent 
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It feels like all we’ve done for the past two weeks is talk about races and racing, so for this episode of F1 Rewind we take a look at what’s been happening away from the circuit.

News

Nico Rosberg talks about his helmet design featured on that plane. Kazuki Nakajima talks about not having his helmet design featured on any plane. And Christine looks into a possible source of Jarno Trulli’s recent mood swings.

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• Length: 04:07 
• Size: 48.9 MB 
• File: rewind1.m4v 
• Transcript: rewind1.pdf 
• Torrent: rewind1.torrent 
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Back by popular demand and thanks to the amazing amount of feedback we received from the pilot show, Sidepodcast proudly presents the first official episode of F1 Rewind.

News

This week Christine takes a look back at the recent run of testing, weighing up who’s looking good and who needs to work that little bit harder.

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• File: Episode47.m4a
• Length: 19:06
• Size: 18.3 MB
• Transcript: Episode47.pdf

An outside broadcast from Autosport International, Episode 47 takes you behind the scenes at the UK’s biggest motorsport show from the comforts of the restaurant at the NEC.

Intro

Where we are, what we’re eating and why we’re absolutely exhausted.

Good Week / Bad Week

This week has been good for drivers and personnel getting jobs and signing contracts, whilst others are being left behind as time advances towards the start of the season.

News and Views

Alex Wurz joins Honda? Who’d have thought that would happen. We discuss why he’s settling for a test role again, and what is in store for the team now. We also share our first impressions from the McLaren and Toyota launch - is Honest Ron not living up to his name, and why do Toyota seem to lack passion in every single department?

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• Length: 04:23 
• Size: 48.9 MB 
• File: video23.m4v 
• Transcript: video23.pdf 
• Torrent: video23.torrent 
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It’s a new year, so a good time to pilot our latest video idea. It’s a concept for a show that we’ve been kicking around for a while now, and finally decided the time was right to pull it all together. A weird decision, given it’s all about Formula 1 news and there’s very little around at the moment.

Anyway, as a pilot, the emphasis is on you guys to let us know what you think, and whether it’s worth the bandwidth it consumes. Also as a pilot, it is obviously new and may face tweaks at any moment - like the fact that I called it a weekly show, which may have been a little bit hasty.

Either way, the important thing for now is to watch, soak up the F1 vibe and share your opinion.

‘Tis the season for new podcast clients, it would seem. Earlier this week the Participatory Culture Foundation released version 1.0 of their free open-source desktop video application, more commonly referred to as Miro.

Miro has been designed with the primary goal of letting users control how they watch Internet television. Unsurprisingly this means the primary focus is video, although it will happily play audio should you want it to.

Unlike the Zune Marketplace we looked at yesterday, Miro isn’t a replacement for iTunes. For one thing, it doesn’t sync to any of your portable devices. What it is designed to do however, is offer the best all-in-one solution for watching Internet TV.

Alongside the facility to manage your video podcast subscriptions, is the ability to search multiple sources of online content (including the likes of YouTube, Dailymotion and many others). This means, not only can you find all of this years Sidepodcast TV shows easily, but you’ll also be able to keep up with the latest episodes from the likes of Honda Racing TV.

We’ve been using this application throughout its gestation period (which feels like forever). It used to be slow and clunky, but the 1.0 release has brought with it speed and stability. It looks clean and runs on almost any platform you can think of.

Internet video is big news these days, especially in the world of Formula 1. If you’re looking for a way to manage it all, you could do a lot worse than checking out Miro.