Problems with Podcasts in iTunes and Podcast App

You are using Feedpoxy for your media files; your latest episode file has a 301 ('moved permanently) redirect to

http://media.blubrry.com/backstory/backstoryradio.org/files/2012/10/Been-There-D one-That_-Historical-Reenactments.mp3

This then has a 302 redirect to

http://backstoryradio.org/files/2012/10/Been-There-Done-That_-Historical-Reenact ments.mp3

This sort of thing is asking for trouble with podcasts, and may not be helping, however it does play OK in iTunes: the fact that the issue seems confined to iOS devices, and from your description, suggests that it is the dreaded 'byte-range requests' problem. The iPhone plays podcasts by using 'byte-range requests', which means calling for part of the file at a time rather than the whole thing. Unfortunately some servers don't support this, and there were an increasing number of complaints that podcasts which worked elsewhere weren't working on an iPhone.

A Terminal test for this suggests that your server is indeed not accepting byte-range requests: I'm afraid that the only ways out of this are a) ask the people running your server to enable it, or b) find another hosting service and make sure before committing that they can handle this.

To test for this on a Mac, open Terminal and enter curl -I -r 200-300 followed by a space and the full URL of your media file. Success is indicated by lines in the response similar to this:

Accept-Ranges: bytes

Content-Length: 101

Content-Range: bytes 200-300/46077596

This was not in the response to your file.

(Caveat: if you are going to use Terminal, stick to entering exactly what is specified. Don't improvise: you can do a lot of damage very easily. This test is quite safe.)

Feedburner doesn't usually cause problems these days, and the Feedproxy side of it generally works - though I'm always suspicious of multiple redirects. However I do think that it's a matter of the actual server hosting the media file.

If you move your media files to Libsyn.com - and then use the libsyn On-Publish to Wordpress offering. That will solve your issues.

You just need to host your media files on Libsyn.com - no more need to use powerpress - and you just repoint Feedburner to the feed created by libsyn.

That will solve all your issues. Note - Libsyn.com is a pay for service.

Regards,

Rob W

libsyn

VFHwebdev wrote:

Has anyone else run into this sort of problem with files hosted within Wordpress?

The whole problem is fairly new and we're all still getting our teeth into it: I don't think anyone else has unearthed this particular issue, so well done. I imagine the PHP has something to do with it, but it's outside my experience. Can you simply host the files in an ordinary folder and refer to them in WordPress? - it would be useful to know because this one is bound to rear its ugly head again any number of times.

I know this is an older thread but we're having the same problem (using podPress plugin instead of Blubrry) - as far as I can tell they both use a similar proxy (redirect) in order to take stats. The host is being a bit elusive about the byte-range request.

In order to experiment, I replicated a portion of the feed on a different server/different host and served one set through the WP plugin and then duplicated it serving from the root and both sets download to device so I can almost rule out that WP is the problem (though I'm tracking another thread that indicates problems when there is a fully dynamic URL). These were all files that were uploaded through GarageBand to the server since the files were too big to use the media uploader.