CERN Accelerating science

Podcasts Help

What are Podcasts?

Podcasts are series of digital files (audio and/or video) released episodically that you can subscribe with dedicated software, usually for listening/viewing offline.
You can read more about podcasts on this page.

Where are the Podcasts? How can I subscribe to a Podcast?

Whenever possible Podcast links are usually available on the collections homepage. They are displayed only when the collection contains material suitable for a Podcast feed. Note that you can always create your own customized Podcast, even when no Podcast link is provided.

To subscribe to a feed it is usually enough to click on the Podcast link, provided that you have the adequate Podcast reader application installed on your computer. Note that the procedure will depend on the installed Podcast reader. Please refer to your Podcast reader user guide for specific instructions.
The Podcast links proposed on the collection pages use the "itpc://" protocol instead of "http://" as this one is usually recognized by Podcast readers. In some particular cases you might have however to remove the "itpc://" prefix to make it work in your Podcast reader.

How to create my custom Podcast?

In the same way as you can create personalized alerts or RSS feeds on the CERN Document Server, you can create personalized Podcasts. To do so, simply perform a standard search on the CERN Document Server for the document matching your criteria. Once done, change the "Output Format" to "Podcast" and click on "Search" again. You can then copy the URL of your browser address field, and use it in your Podcast reader to subscribe to your personalized Podcast.
Note that the Podcast will only contain episode for search results having material adequate for Podcasts.

What is the format of your Podcasts? What is the content?

Our Podcasts are just RSS feeds enhanced with Podcast-specific tags (in http://www.itunes.com/dtds/podcast-1.0.dtd) served using an "application/rss+xml" content-type. They are generated simply using the Invenio search engine with a dedicated output format so that they can be created based on any criteria matching material on the CERN Document Server.
The Podcasts contain usually audio (mp3) and video (h.264/mp4) files, depending on the available material.

The material available on the CERN Document Server is usually produced by CERN, focused on High Energy Physics. It ranges from educational material for general audience to highly specialized talks for physicists. The Podcasts available on the CERN Document Server can therefore include any of these types of material.

Your Podcast cannot be read by my application

Some applications might not support videos in Podcasts. In these cases you might want to create a personalized Podcast that does only contain audio. Some application might simply not support the file formats used in our Podcasts.

In some cases it might be necessary to remove the "itpc://" prefix used in URLs to have the Podcast accepted by your application.

Since the content of the Podcasts is produced on the basis of the metadata submitted by "users" to the CERN Document Server, it might be that the content sometimes needs to be cleaned. If you think that this is the case, you can contact the technical support