Now, this is something very cool: ADC on iTunes. Apple finally decided to do something about the lame ADC TV, a service for ADC members to watch training videos. They moved it to iTunes where you can download the movies and watch them at your convenience. The first ADC on iTunes movies (Leopard Sessions from WWDC) are part of the new Leopard Early Start Kit.
Some time ago I filed a feature request for WWDC video as 'vodcasts', so this should come close to what I wanted. However, the implementation isn't very good, in my opinion.
For example, last night I downloaded a WWDC session on 64 bitness, starring Ali Ozer. But instead of Ali, I'm looking a film of the presentation slides, with Ali as voice over. It's good, the information is all there, but at 365 MB for 50 minutes of spoken word + slides it does strike me as a gigantic waste of bandwidth. Surely some clever Quicktime format with animation + sound (or even just Flash) could have resulted in a better image quality and a much smaller file size? Such a file could also be chaptered and possibly searchable, so you don't need the presentation and the slides as separate downloads.
Oh well, I see another feature request...
...or at least they moved it to iTunes where you can try and guess what the Error -1001 you get six hours into a download is, then jump through the authentication hoops again before you can restart the download. I welcome the idea that we now get to keep the videos (last year they were available only as streams, with much the same auth problems) but on my
Hey, I posted a comment here yesterday. Where has it gone?
Actually its iTunes U, not iTunes.
See http://www.oreillynet.com/mac/blog/2006/10/blog_comments_and_agressive_sp.html for an explanation about the comment problem we experienced.