Cannot be played on this ipad - however, the same feed plays on RSSRadio app :S

Question

Hi,
I am the network manager of a school that has just done a 1 to 1 roll out of over a thousand iPad 2's to its pupils, and I have made some video tutorials for them - the next problem I had was distributing these videos, I tried various different methods and then decided that podcasting them would probably be a handy way being as this would allow them to get the tutorials that they required, and would work with our current systems.
The problem I have is that when you click on the podcast in the iTunes app it says 'videoname' cannot be played on this iPad - now, this is hard to believe as if I embed this video in an epub, it works, if I view the podcast feed in RSSRadio App all the video's play fine.
They are MP4's
http://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/honywood-ipad-tutorials/id464275109
is the link to it on iTunes
http://www.honywoodschool.com/podcast/44986
is the feed, bear in mind that this is generated for us by our Virtual Learning Environment and we can't edit the XML, we literally have to just press 'podcast this directory' - the code for the feed looks like this :
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<rss xmlns:itunes="http://www.itunes.com/dtds/podcast-1.0.dtd" version="2.0">
<channel>
<title>Honywood iPad Tutorials</title>
<description></description>
  <item>
   <title>howtosetupappleid.mp4</title>
   <description>How to set up an apple ID to use on your iPad without using a credit card</description>
   <itunes:author></itunes:author>
   <pubDate>Mon, 12 Sep 2011 12:11:48 +0100</pubDate>
   <enclosure url="http://www.honywoodschool.com/user/59/133934.mp4" length="74725870" type="video/x-mpeg" />
   <guid>http://www.honywoodschool.com/user/59/133934.mp4</guid>
  </item>
  <item>
   <title>overview.mp4</title>
   <description>Hardware overview of your iPad</description>
   <itunes:author></itunes:author>
   <pubDate>Fri, 09 Sep 2011 12:26:10 +0100</pubDate>
   <enclosure url="http://www.honywoodschool.com/user/59/133911.mp4" length="21943423" type="video/x-mpeg" />
   <guid>http://www.honywoodschool.com/user/59/133911.mp4</guid>
  </item>
  <item>
   <title>homewifi.mp4</title>
   <description>How to connect your iPad to your home WiFi</description>
   <itunes:author></itunes:author>
   <pubDate>Fri, 09 Sep 2011 12:26:02 +0100</pubDate>
   <enclosure url="http://www.honywoodschool.com/user/59/133910.mp4" length="9085406" type="video/x-mpeg" />
   <guid>http://www.honywoodschool.com/user/59/133910.mp4</guid>
  </item>
  <item>
   <title>emailsetup.mp4</title>
   <description>How to set up your Honywood Email on your iPad</description>
   <itunes:author></itunes:author>
   <pubDate>Fri, 09 Sep 2011 12:25:58 +0100</pubDate>
   <enclosure url="http://www.honywoodschool.com/user/59/133909.mp4" length="71933660" type="video/x-mpeg" />
   <guid>http://www.honywoodschool.com/user/59/133909.mp4</guid>
  </item>
  <item>
   <title>passcode.mp4</title>
   <description>How to set the Passcode on your iPad</description>
   <itunes:author></itunes:author>
   <pubDate>Fri, 09 Sep 2011 12:25:38 +0100</pubDate>
   <enclosure url="http://www.honywoodschool.com/user/59/133908.mp4" length="24968873" type="video/x-mpeg" />
   <guid>http://www.honywoodschool.com/user/59/133908.mp4</guid>
  </item>
</channel>
</rss>
but I can't believe that this works in one podcast app and not iTunes (it seems to work fine in iTunes on the PC too, so surely that would suggest the podcast RSS or whatever you'd call it is formatted correctly?)
Any ideas would be massively helpful, even if only to say I have to re-encode my videos AGAIN, even though they do play on the iPad if I get them onto it via a different means than iTunes.
Cheers
Charles

Answer 1

When you have a query please post the feed URL rather than its contents. For the record, yours is at
http://www.honywoodschool.com/podcast/44986
I don't have an iPad to test this, so I can only refer you to Apple's Podcast Tech Specs page:
http://www.apple.com/itunes/podcasts/specs.html#formattingvideo
This says that the maximum video size for an iPad is 1024x768 - your latest episode is 1280x720.
Slightly confusingly, it also says
'iPad & Apple TV can play the following video formats:
H.264 video up to 720p, 30 frames per second, Main Profile level 3.1 with AAC-LC audio up to 160 Kbps per channel, 48kHz, stereo audio in .m4v, .mp4, and .mov file formats
MPEG-4 video, up to 2.5 Mbps, 640 by 480 pixels, 30 frames per second, Simple Profile with AAC-LC audio up to 160 Kbps, 48kHz, stereo audio in .m4v, .mp4, and .mov file formats
Motion JPEG (M-JPEG) up to 35 Mbps, 1280 by 720 pixels, 30 frames per second, audio in ulaw, PCM stereo audio in .avi file format'
which suggests that mp4 files are even more limited.
Incidentally your feed gives this URL for the media file:
http://www.honywoodschool.com/user/59/133934.mp4
However when downloaded this produces a file called 'howtosetupappeid.mp4' so soe sort of redirect appears to be in place, and these can sometimes cause trouble. It's better to link directly to the file - it's possible that the iPad doesn't handle the redirect.
That's all I can suggest: if it still doesn't cover the problem I can only refer you to the iPad forum where someone may be able to actually try your podcast and offer a comment.