---

This refers to the format of the compressed audio used in a podcast. The main audio format is MP3 but others include M4A - sometimes referred to as AAC (Advanced Audio Coding).

---

This is usually based on vocals with some sound effects and music. The main audio formats used in podacsting are MP3 and M4A (sometimes referred to as AAC).

---

This is a means of including details about a podcast within a RSS feed. For example, an enclosure would include information about the URL of the podcast, it's MIME type and the length of the file.

---

The enclosure tag contains information about the URL of the podcast, the length of the file (in bytes) and it's MIME type in the form of attributes.

<enclosure url="http://recap.ltd.uk/podcasts/vid2promo.m4v" length="3336636"
type="video/quicktime"/>

Note that the enclosure tag does not provide any other information and is, therefore, usually written in the form shown above. Including the "/" character towards the end of the tag is short hand notation to save writing an end tag.

---

There are two commonly used formats for creating enhanced podcasts - M4A and M4B. The M4A format was originally devised for use with audio books, the M4B for podcasts. In practice, these have now become interchangeable.

---

This is a podcast that can contain audio, chapters, images and web links. The two commonly used formats for enhanced podcasts are M4A and M4B.

---

This is a MPEG-4 format and used for compressing audio podcasts as well as enhanced podcasts - podcasts with audio and digital images. Unless specific reference to the nature of the podcast is included in the RSS feed description (or sometimes an image in podcast directories) then you will not know whether the podcast is just in audio format or enhanced format until it is downloaded.

---

This is a MPEG-4 format, usually used for compressing audio books but sometimes used to create enhanced podcasts - podcasts with audio and digital images. Currently, there are relatively few podcasts published in this particular format.

---

This is one of the formats used for video podcasts, based on a codec used by the QuickTime. This codec is part of the MPEG-4, a global multimedia standard introduced to provide optimised video podcasts for the video iPod ®.

QuickTime is multimedia software that is used to display synchronized graphics, sound, video, text and music. This was introduced Produced by Apple Computer Inc. the software is available in versions for Mac OS and Windows.

---

Stands for Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions - an Internet Standard. MIME is a key component of communication protocols such as HTTP, which requires that data be transmitted in the context of e-mail-like messages, even though the data may not actually be e-mail.

The MIME type is allocated by a webserver to indicate the format of a stored file. Occasionally, the MIME types may not have been updated on the webserver to produce the correct MIME type.