iTunes podcast sharing between computers

I listen/ watch a LOT of podcasts and mange them through iTunes on my primary mac. I find it pretty easy to keep current on the audio ones by listening to them on my iPhone while working throughout the day, but the video podcasts just seem to pile up because they require more attention and are harder to multi-task to. As a result, they rarely get watched on my iPhone, in fact I don’t even sync most of them.

So I have been looking for a workflow solution to keep current and get through the backlog of video podcasts. While I spend a good amount of time in the mornings and evenings at my primary mac I find myself using most of the screen real estate for photo processing or other tasks which doesn’t leave me with a lot of room to play the video podcasts on this machine. Moreover, unlike audio podcasts, I have found when playing a video in a separate window iTunes does not advance to the next video when the current one finishes playing. This requires a lot of back and forth between what I’m working on and iTunes.
A few days ago I remember the new “home sharing” feature in iTunes. Yes, I know I could share libraries before on my home network before, but this incited to give it try with the idea of playing these videos on my MacBook Air sitting next to my iMac as I worked. Sort of a dual monitor solution, something I’ve used successfully for Hulu.

As would be expected the podcasts play just fine streaming them across the network to my MacBook Air without actually moving the files, which was the goal. However, something peculiar and unexpected happened. The podcast tracks were never recognized as having been played (and therefore triggered to be removed on the next refresh) on my primary machine. So in effect, I can watch the videos on a second machine but then I have to figure out which ones I watched and mark them as so on the primary machine. Definitely not a good solution. I am actually very curious as to the logic of why a track played on a shared machine would not be counted as played in the master library. Whenever I pay a podcast or song on any iPod or my Apple TV the track is recorded as having been played when it syncs back with the master library, so I find it quite odd that it doesn’t seem to work that way when using the Home Sharing feature. I’ll chalk that one up to another Apple quirk.

Anyway, if anyone has any workflow suggestions for video podcasts let me know.

Posted in Technology, Tumblelog on January 18th, 2010 Taged with iPhone, ITunes, Podcast

Comments

blog comments powered by Disqus