All along on MediaBlog, I’ve prized our podcasting tools highly in support of a trend I can see becoming very popular and vibrant as time rolls on. Not really having much time to produce original podcasts myself, I’ve been treating my own podcast as an area to post audio/video that’s hard to find elsewhere.

The snag I keep running into: How to convert the various formats that videos come in into something that’s iTunes- and iPod-compatible? For those not in the know, Apple’s technical spec for podcasts has a pretty narrow definition of what audio and video formats are permissible – obviously, just their own. So often there’s a need to convert video in particular to the .mov, .mp4, or .m4v formats.

Happily, there’s a freeware utility out there that allows you to do this with nearly every video format. I’ve used the Jodix Free iPod Video Converter program to convert two videos with great success thus far. Best of all: It’s freeware.