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I'm looking for a way of subscribing to and watching TED talk videos on the HTC Desire, but I want support for off-line viewing.

The Mother TED app seems to require an active network connection, which isn't suitable since I want to be able to watch videos on the underground.

There's an RSS feed of the mp4 videos here - is there anything like Google Listen that supports mp4 video?

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Great question. I'm kind of bummed that Listen doesn't support video podcasts yet. Otherwise if it did, that would solve the problem for sure. –  Webs Sep 4 '10 at 3:40

5 Answers 5

up vote 2 down vote accepted

I use BeyondPod (the full version) to watch TED Talks all the time. It pulls in a list of the videos from the feed and you can choose to download which ever ones you want and then play them right in BeyondPod. There is no data connection required.

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Excellent, that does the trick. If I can get this question transferred over to my ownership I'll mark this accepted, in the mean-time, have a +1 :) –  therefromhere Apr 30 '11 at 22:04
@therefromhere: I've pinged the dev team, since Mods can't do that. –  Al E. May 2 '11 at 3:58
@Al thanks. It's mine now. All mine! Muhahahaha. cough. –  therefromhere May 2 '11 at 9:11

It probably did not exist when you posted this question, but now TED Air can download a video to watch it offline.

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I would suggest using doubleTwist. doubleTwist will re-encode any video to be suitable for your device, simply by dragging the video onto your device listed in the program.

doubleTwist has built-in functionality for subscribing to podcasts, but I use iTunes to organize podcasts, then use doubleTwist to send the content to, and play the content on, my HTC Hero.

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As of this date, simply download the official TED app and select the talk you like to view offline. Then tap the download icon to the top-right corner to download. You can then play the downloaded videos offline from My Talks tab.

If you are a kind of person who like to play the videos at higher speed, you can get apps that support fast playback such as VLC for Android or Dice Player. Since all the downloaded files are stored in /sdcard/Android/data/com.ted.android/files/, you can point the video player to that path.

Hope this helps someone.

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Wow... I saw this quesion, thought "there's gotta be something"... but a quick look around the market and web search shows there's nothing that's popular. I did find this article about podcast managers for Android.

I thought Google Listen could do this? Or maybe it only recently added that functionality?

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You'd think so, but no, Google Listen doesn't support that yet. –  therefromhere Apr 30 '11 at 21:25

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