My podcasts are not getting marked correctly between devices

I have an iPhone 4, the New iPad and a MacBook. I am having a lot of trouble syncing the podcasts between them. After listening to a podcast, if i do a Wifi sync it will be set it again as Unplayed. There are also duplicate podcasts downloaded into the MacBook. Am throughly confused with this mess. I droped using the Wifi sync completely because of this. Even still the same problems persists. Can any one help me with this? I have all the software up to date.