I live in a house with very bad television reception which allows me when the weather is good, to get only 3 television channels. When it is raining, I am lucky if I can get one. I  have had to make the move to watching TV through my computer as this is much more reliable for me. A result was that I can now get much more interesting content, as I choose what shows I want to watch out of a huge range available internationally.

Certain TV channels, websites and individual shows are now releasing their content online in the form of a Vodcast. The Vodcast software which you need to install on your computer downloads the show around the time the show goes to air for you to view at your own convenience at a later time. With this technology taking off and the list of available content getting longer, it won’t be long before we can get all our TV viewing material this way.

This article will look at some of the software you can use to get Vodcasts onto your computer. Vodcasts work very similar to RSS feeds and Podcasts, only this time for video. In fact, a Vodcast is a Podcast. They all provide syndicated content. We can set the content to download automatically to our computers without needing to go to the website to get the video files manually. Vodcasting often offers us entire shows rather than a few select grabs.

This article is in no way comprehensive. It is for people who have not yet experienced watching Vodcasts on their computer and want to give it a go.

Here’s an analogy to describe what a Vodcast feed is: Think of it as a television station that you watch when you want to, only delivering you the shows you like to watch. You don’t have to wait for you shows time slot. You can fast forward and rewind through any of it and save it away for watching later, or delete it. You are in control.

Subscribing

The term subscribing refers to adding a feed to your Vodcast software. Once you have added a Vodcast feed to your software so you receive updates, you have subscribed to that feed.

The majority of the software we will look at have a catalogue of the more popular Vodcast feeds, allowing us to sift through them and select which ones we want to install in our software. Once it is in our software, we can select to download all episodes or specific episodes.

Vodcast software/aggregators

To get access to Vodcasts we first need to download some feed software, otherwise known as an aggregator. Vodcast software and aggregators are the same thing. They scan the Vodcast feed you have subscribed to for updated content and then deliver the Vodcasts to you. The software for Vodcasts and Podcasts are very similar and many will do both jobs for you.

Below is a quick rundown of some worthwhile Vodcast Aggregators, including advantages and disadvantages of each.

Democracy: is an all-in-one free Vodcast management system. Sounds impressive.

It has a  very nice interface and a media player built in so you can play your vodcasts internally after they are downloaded. I had a few problems with video placement in Vista but it is definitely my preferred environment for downloading Vodcasts.

You can schedule your downloads and set democracy to delete files after a set period of days. This nice piece of software is available for free from getdemocracy.com.

iTunes: This is probably the most popular Vodcast aggregator of all that are available. iTunes is sort of where the whole Podcast/Vodcast phenomena started as Vodcasts were designed to be able to be transferred to portable devices such as an iPod.

You can go into the directory and load up a plethora of Vodcasts you can choose from, which iTunes will then download for you. You also have the option of subscribing to feeds that are not in the directory.

iTunes has quite a nice interface and is easy to use. You can play all of your downloaded media within iTunes, making it a complete package for your Vodcasting needs. With regular updates, you won’t go wrong with this. Available for free through Apple.

Juice: is another popular piece of Vodcasting software. It has a simple interface and does the job. Yet again you have the directory to find Vodcast feeds and you can schedule your downloads.

This system is very bare bones, without an inbuilt video player. Instead it will load your downloaded Vodcasts into another player on your computer such as Winamp or Windows Media Player.

This is a good way to go if you want a small package to get your Vodcasts.

This is available for free from http://juicereceiver.sourceforge.net/.

The list of available Vodcast software is very long and you can have a search around the web for many more pieces of software that will look after your Vodcasting needs.These applications are a good place to start.

Once you have the files on your computer, many portable devices will be able to play the file formats podcasts come in. Transfer the file to your devices storage card and try playing it.

If you are on an internet plan which has download limits, take caution when downloading Vodcasts as they can make quite a large dent quickly, and could result in excess usage charges.

I hope you have enjoyed reading this article and hope it has cleared up what Vodcasting is for you, getting you started in the Vodcasting world. Find out more stuff at Inspectmygadget.com.