With the release of Apple TV Take 2, Apple is putting podcasts and video podcasts front and center in people’s living rooms. This means that your podcast now needs to look great in HD.

Here are 5 ways to update your podcast for Apple TV Take 2:

• Increase the resolution of your video podcast. Apple strongly encourages you to increase the resolution of your video to 640√ó480 or 640√ó360 (depending on the aspect ratio of your source files). Video podcasts at this resolution look good on Apple TV and still play on iPhone and video-compatible iPods. They recommend that you encode using QuickTime‚Äôs ‚ÄúMovie to iPod‚Äù preset or Compressor‚Äôs ‚ÄúApple > Apple Devices > H.264 for iPod video and iPhone 640√ó480‚Ä≥ preset.
• Enable video fast starting. When you perform the final encode on your video, enable fast starting. Most recent versions of QuickTime enable this setting automatically. But it‚Äôs easy to undo the setting by making changes to the file after the encode. If you do make a change after the encode, be sure to ‚ÄúSave As‚Äù again.
• Increase your podcast art resolution. Apple TV displays a large version of your podcast art. Use a 600√ó600 square JPG or PNG file.
• Make sure your host is up to snuff. iTunes and Apple TV use byte-range requests in some circumstances. For example, Apple TV 2.0 employs this functionality when the user accesses the podcast directly over the Internet. We recommend hosting episode files on HTTP/1.1 servers that correctly support the HTTP byte-range request specification.
• Make sure your server is configured correctly. Make sure that your HTTP servers return the correct MIME types in the Content-Type header. Failing to do so can create errors. A list of MIME types can be found in the iTunes podcast technical spec.

You may want to review Apple’s full recommendations for podcasts to make sure that your podcast is optimized for the company’s devices.