Downloading Podcasts/Vodcasts Using iTunes

Dear Lucy,

Thanks for the question. Looking at the link you’ve provided, you can indeed download videos of the ABC Fora TV show, however it comes in podcast format. Podcasts are a great way of keeping up-to-date with news in your own time. Video podcasts like the one you have mentioned here are fantastic, but it’s important to keep in mind that, depending on the video’s length and quality, they can be very large to download. The ABC videos you’ve mentioned here are about 200-300MB each so they may take a few minutes to download if you have an ADSL2+ connection.

For simplicity, we would recommend downloading iTunes and using that to manage your podcasts.

Once you’ve installed it, return to the ABC page and down the bottom you will see two rather long addresses that end with “.xml”. These are links to what’s known as a podcast subscription feed (more info on this at http://tinyurl.com/699sor). Subscription feeds are updated each time a new podcast or vodcast (video-on-demand podcast) is released. Copy the video podcast URL by selecting it all (starting at the http://) and pressing CTRL + C.

Open iTunes and click on Advanced > Subscribe to Podcast.

Press CTRL + V to paste the copied URL into the box that pops up and press OK.

iTunes will take you into the podcast directory where you can see and download any of the past episodes released. By default, iTunes will download only the most recent episode, but you can change this by clicking on the Settings button inside the podcast directory. If you just want specific episodes you can download these by clicking on the Get button next to each.

To watch or listen to a podcast, simply download it and then double click it and it will start to play.  

Good luck!