What are podcasts and vodcasts?
A podcast is a digital audio file that is distributed over the Internet for playback on portable media players and personal computers.
Podcast software allows you to subscribe to a podcast feed and automatically receive the latest audio or video file as soon as it's available, without having to go to a specific site and download it from there.
For example, if you subscribe to the podcasts on www.olympic.org, when a new audio or video file becomes available, your software will automatically download it.
The downloaded files can then be played, replayed, or archived as with any other computer file, or stored to an MP3 player.
The steps you go though to subscribe to a podcast will vary depending on which software you choose.
If you decide that you no longer want to receive podcasts, it should be very easy to unsubscribe. Again, how you do this will depend on your software, but you should look for "Clear" or "Unsubscribe" options.
Video Podcasts, commonly called vodcasts, include the same features as the audio version. However, for video, the episode should play on your computer but will only play on certain portable players and mobile phones (the video is in mp4 format).