I get this question every second week or so – someone would like to buy the yearly subscription and wonders whether she’ll be able to watch the recordings on her iPad.

Short answer: Yes for most webinars.

Update 2012-07-13: All webinars recorded prior to July 1st 2012 are available in ARF format. Many of them are also available in edited MP4 format.

More precise answer: It depends.

And the long story: webinars are recorded within the WebEx system in a proprietary (ARF) format and streamed from WebEx servers. You can download the ARF file for webinars recorded more than a year ago and convert it to MP4 or Flash format yourself using the WebEx-provided player (Windows only).

I’m converting recent webinars to MP4 format and publishing them, but I’m a bit Ivan about the results and want to do a proper job and clean them up before they’re published. That takes an enormous amount of time (just spent the whole weekend working on the DMVPN Designs webinar) and thus there’s usually a gap between the time the streamed recording is published (immediately after the webinar) and the time you can download it in MP4 format.

If you want to check which recordings I’ve already converted to MP4 format, please go to the list of materials you get with yearly subscription; some webinars have MP4 files in the list of documents.