Library Podcast… file extension issues

I’ve been working on putting a podcast up for The Commons at work. Which is a little harder than it sounds. First I had to figure out podcast RSS feeds. The University of Washington has a good site for that.

Then there was an issue with the .m4a file that GarageBand saves podcasts as. .m4a is not an official MIME media type, which means it’s probably not going to be in the Apache mime types. At least it wasn’t for the library web server. And it might not hurt to add .m4v as well.

AddType video/mp4 .m4v
AddType audio/mp4 .m4a

MPEG 4 has various (and mostly interchangeable) file extensions, although .mp4 is the only official extension. But Apple has popularized .m4a and .m4v into what appear to be defacto standards.