Over the last few weeks, we have received several emails requesting an Ogg version of the podcast. I knew this would eventually crop up and while I initially did not produce such a version of the show to minimise production time, I am not oblivious to the fact that many people place a lot of importance in making your podcast available in Ogg, especially if it is a show that primarily deals with Free Software. I personally consume 95% of my podcasts on portable players, however, and I’ve yet to meet one person who actually owns a player that supports the Ogg format. I am not saying that such a player doesn’t exist or that I don’t get the ideological reasons behind using Ogg, I am just saying that it is still a very much impractical format for a large majority of people.

Nonetheless, I am willing to consider the publishing the show in that format, even if it means about an hour of additional production time since I not only have to re-encode every episode but I also have to tag that version on its own and create a special Ogg feed for it that I have to publish seperately. I am very much suspecting all this effort won’t warrant the actual number of downloads we will be getting for this version, but I am willing to try. The reason why I am posting this here instead of just doing it, is the fact that I want everyone to understand the work involved in this and also to make sure that it is understood that this will be the only two versions of the show I will be doing — don’t even try to talk me into different bitrates or somesuch.

I don’t know exactly when we will be releasing the first Ogg version of an episode since I am currently looking for dedicated hosting and bandwidth for the podcast files; our listenership has grown so much, that we will soon be forced to move them off this server. I will decide where to host the Ogg files and how to produce them after I know how much the new delivery method will be costing me. You may see a donation button appear on this website soon after. I definitely don’t want to consider any advertising neither on the site nor in the show itself at this point, so if you want to help us along with the fees (I will definitely write a post on the blog telling you exactly how much those amount to once I know myself), just use that button once we put it up.

I really appreciate the fact that so many people seem to enjoy this show and I am happy about every piece of listener email we receive. So far, all of them have been really positive. I hope the people who requested the Ogg version can live with this arrangement. If not, or if you have any other ideas, let me know, OK? Thanks again for listening, I’m having the time of my life doing this!