Escape Artists

Administrivia => Support Desk => Topic started by: olivaw on July 14, 2011, 12:11:52 AM

Title: Podcastle feed error
Post by: olivaw on July 14, 2011, 12:11:52 AM
Hi
Using either Banshee media player or Rhythmbox (both on linux), as of PC165 I get 'Parsing error updating Podcastle' or 'There was a problem adding this podcast: Unable to parse the feed contents. Please verify the url: http://podcastle.org/feed/rss2'
Previous casts have automatically downloaded without problems.
Going to this URL in firefox and playing the mp3 from there worked fine.

Title: Re: Podcastle feed error
Post by: corydodt on August 05, 2011, 07:06:20 PM
I'm having the exact same problem in Banshee. I normally use gpodder and am trying to switch to banshee.

- 11 podcast subscriptions in gpodder
- all 8 non-escape-artists podcasts import successfully
- all 3 escape artists podcasts (podcastle, escape pod and pseudopod) say "Parsing error updating $url"

The broken URLs are:

http://pseudopod.org/feed/rss2
http://escapepod.org/feed/
http://podcastle.org/feed/rss2

Banshee supports rss2 feeds. (Most of my feeds are rss2).

I did notice that when I use curl to fetch these feeds, curl does not decode them from gzip encoding, which it normally would do. This may indicate a problem with the HTTP headers.
Title: Re: Podcastle feed error
Post by: DKT on August 08, 2011, 03:45:51 PM
Hey all,

I just responded to this in the other thread (http://forum.escapeartists.net/index.php?topic=5302.msg91293#new), but have copied my response below just in case y'all didn't see it:

I just got back from a two week vacation. I kind of intermittently logged on from my phone to read episode comments (I'm addicted) but didn't have a chance to respond to this until now.

We'd received some emails about this earlier, and I'd forwarded it to our internet ninjas, and thought it was handled, but apparently not. (They were probably busy training Batman or something.) So thanks for bringing it to our attention, and hopefully it'll be fixed soon.

-Dave
Title: Re: Podcastle feed error
Post by: olivaw on August 08, 2011, 04:17:06 PM
Thanks!
Title: Re: Podcastle feed error
Post by: EasyTarget on August 23, 2011, 01:57:49 PM
Hi All;

Well; this is still ongoing. I use my mobile (a Nokia N series device) to subscribe to podcasts using the built-in podcast receiver; it works flawlessly for all my podcast sources except EscapeArtist feeds. It used to work here too but started playing up in May (about the time of this posting (http://forum.escapeartists.net/index.php?topic=4927.0)).

Like others note it comes and goes; I check most days and very occasionally it works (seems to be related to you just releasing a new item) and I can download what I'm missing. Next time I refresh it will be failing again.

So; I sat down just now to see what is happening; I think the answer is that you are sending the feed out compressed (gzipped, mod_deflate) and not all devices can deal with that, or maybe your compression is incorrect. FFox, iTunes, and other more sophisticated feed readers have no problem but any reader (eg based on older XML libraries etc) that is not aware of this form of compression will choke on the seemingly random garbage returned.

I tried fiddling with UserAgent strings to see if I could get any difference in the returned data but this does not seem to make a difference in my limited test; I wanted to see if you were trying to serve the feed compressed/plain based on UA identifier. This started about the same time you were trying to reduce the bandwidth and playing with the feed contents, so I'm guessing this was caused by part of that work.

I like the 'full' feeds and extra info when I look in the browser; but maybe we could have a really basic feed with just the last X (50?) audio episodes, text description, enclosure link and nothing else.. and uncompressed?
- This would greatly benefit people like me who want to just get the audio onto simple/older devices. And would probably still be a smaller download than the compressed version of the full feed.
Title: Re: Podcastle feed error
Post by: stePH on August 23, 2011, 10:23:25 PM
I'm currently so far behind in my podcast backlog that I haven't even noticed if I'm getting current episodes of EA 'casts.
Title: Re: Podcastle feed error
Post by: Nojh on October 01, 2011, 12:13:19 AM
Is this still an ongoing issue for you guys, because it is for me.
Title: Re: Podcastle feed error
Post by: stePH on November 21, 2011, 08:07:57 PM
"The God-Death of Halla" always locks up MediaMonkey mid-download; I've tried and restarted several times. Same with one of the Escape Pod episodes from a few weeks back.
Title: Re: Podcastle feed error
Post by: pseudonym on February 03, 2012, 01:55:08 AM
I got this error at around ep. 152 as well (don't remember), and it still doesn't work to this day. Is this going to be fixed?
Title: Re: Podcastle feed error
Post by: DKT on February 03, 2012, 05:22:24 AM
Huh. I actually thought this was fixed. I'll forward it to our tech support people.
Title: Re: Podcastle feed error
Post by: pseudonym on February 03, 2012, 09:53:33 AM
Hold that. I've been working on it this morning, and it turns out that neither Banshee or Rhythmbox support atom-feeds, and will give this exact error. Kinda lame, considering these are the two standard players for ubuntu. I take it that you using atom-feeds.

For other people who get this problem - I got it running by using gPodder, which you can get with a couple of clicks from the softwarecenter. It works with no problem at all.

So...no need to fix anything from your side.
Title: Re: Podcastle feed error
Post by: startrek.steve on January 03, 2013, 01:36:04 PM
After some investigating, I tried gpodder, which downloads them correctly, but gives them a random filename unless you sync the files with another device, which cant be done on a schedule. After MORE research I found Mashpodder, which is a commandline script. It does everything perfectly including filenames and ID3 tags and can be run on a cron schedule. I shall be downloading Escape Pod and Pseudopod with this in the future. Strangely though, although the Pseudopod feed gave an error in the log, it still downloaded the episode with no errors in the ID3 tags? Wierd!
I occasionally get strange characters in the ID3 in Pseudopod, Mysterious Universe and Drabblecast, but they still play ok.

Looks like problem solved :-)

Steve
Title: Re: Podcastle feed error
Post by: Fenrix on March 25, 2013, 11:34:38 PM
I am randomly missing PC249 and PC 251, as well as minature 75, from my itunes feed.
Title: Re: Podcastle feed error
Post by: DKT on March 27, 2013, 04:36:08 AM
Innnnnnnnnnteresting. I'm using iTunes as well, and all the stories showed up, but I just pinged our tech support again to look into this. Hopefully it'll be addressed soon.
Title: Re: Podcastle feed error
Post by: startrek.steve on September 30, 2014, 10:32:33 AM
After some investigating, I tried gpodder, which downloads them correctly, but gives them a random filename unless you sync the files with another device, which cant be done on a schedule. After MORE research I found Mashpodder, which is a commandline script. It does everything perfectly including filenames and ID3 tags and can be run on a cron schedule. I shall be downloading Escape Pod and Pseudopod with this in the future. Strangely though, although the Pseudopod feed gave an error in the log, it still downloaded the episode with no errors in the ID3 tags? Wierd!
I occasionally get strange characters in the ID3 in Pseudopod, Mysterious Universe and Drabblecast, but they still play ok.

Looks like problem solved :-)

Steve

Or Not!
I've got nothing from EscapePod since Aug 21st and Pseudopod a couple of weeks later, I emailed Alasdair and he told Graeme, he's looking into it now.
Luckily Im so far behind that it will be over a month I guess before its an issue. All my other podcasts work fine (Clarkes World and Mysterious Universe for example)

Steve