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Podcast - from RSS

I currently have an RSS feed with MP3 and MP4 files, hosted on the same server as our website. The feed is working fine and the podcasts are being pulled onto our account, however if you open up the iTunes Podcast app on your iPhone or PC, the podcasts do not play; they are stuck in an infinite loop. The only place it works is if you open up the Podcast account on the browser.


Our Podcast is Church of the King. Here is a link to the podcast page:


https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/church-of-the-king/id174722347


Thanks,

Ludvig Andersson

Posted on Mar 10, 2022 3:00 PM

Reply
Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Mar 11, 2022 7:27 AM

The file names of many of your media files have spaces in them. This is a fatal error: spaces are not allowed in a URL.


Browsers, and evidently Podcasts app when subscribing, get round this by automatically substituting the code %20 so that the URL will work: however the 'Browse' section of the app does not. This means that it sees the URL ending at the first space, and as obviously that doesn't work, it sees no episode media and thus does not display the episode. (The web preview page works because browsers handle the spaces as I described).


This apparently affects 142 episodes, in both the media file URL and the 'GUID' tag. You were originally replacing spaces with a hyphen, but stopped doing this on 9 June 2019 as far as I can see. You will have to amend all these episodes, either by replacing the spaces with hyphens or underscores and then amending the URLs in the feed, or by replacing all the spaces in these URTLs in the feed with the code %20 - that will work.


Additionally:


You have 521 episodes: Podcasts will display only the latest 300 of these (though subscribers on a Mac or PC may see them all.


The video version of the episode of 10 Nov 2019 has the URL of the audio version and so won't show as the GUID tag is duplicated (and there are spaces).



4 replies
Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Mar 11, 2022 7:27 AM in response to LudvigAndersson

The file names of many of your media files have spaces in them. This is a fatal error: spaces are not allowed in a URL.


Browsers, and evidently Podcasts app when subscribing, get round this by automatically substituting the code %20 so that the URL will work: however the 'Browse' section of the app does not. This means that it sees the URL ending at the first space, and as obviously that doesn't work, it sees no episode media and thus does not display the episode. (The web preview page works because browsers handle the spaces as I described).


This apparently affects 142 episodes, in both the media file URL and the 'GUID' tag. You were originally replacing spaces with a hyphen, but stopped doing this on 9 June 2019 as far as I can see. You will have to amend all these episodes, either by replacing the spaces with hyphens or underscores and then amending the URLs in the feed, or by replacing all the spaces in these URTLs in the feed with the code %20 - that will work.


Additionally:


You have 521 episodes: Podcasts will display only the latest 300 of these (though subscribers on a Mac or PC may see them all.


The video version of the episode of 10 Nov 2019 has the URL of the audio version and so won't show as the GUID tag is duplicated (and there are spaces).



Mar 10, 2022 3:21 PM in response to LudvigAndersson

The preview page shows the latest episode to be March 6: the audio version plays but the video does not: perhaps it's a format Firefox can't handle.


Puzzlingly the podcasts app (Catalina) in 'Browse' mode (which should match the preview) shows no episodes after 2019. When subscribing (where the feed is read directly, unlike iOS) the latest episode shows and plays in both versions.


I can't check on iOS or Windows. I can't offer an explanation. If you post the feed URL (which you should always do when nyou have a query) I will have a look (tomorrow) and see if anything suggests itself.

Podcast - from RSS

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