Using Dropbox to host files

Question

Using Dropbox to host files

Hi there,

I finally figured the problem out, and am saving this here so others can learn from my mistake.

Dropbox can be used as a simple hosting service to serve up files, as long as you do not host anything too popular that takes up too much bandwidth. (MacLife magazine gave this tip a while back to host iWeb sites.) Simply add a file into dropbox, right-click on it in the Finder and with the Dropbox menu get the sharing link. It will give you a URL to the file that others can download from.

I tried pasting that into my podcast feed, but the files did not show up. It turned out that the dropbox link brings you to a dropbox page where you can click the Download button or sign up for dropbox yourself. If you copy that download link, (usually starts with https://dl.dropbox.com) it should work. The only downside to this is that iTunes will not display the length of time for the file, it shows up as "Continuous" under the Time column when downloaded, as if its a stream.

iPhone 4, iOS 5

Posted on Jan 30, 2013 10:36 AM

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Answer 1

Jan 30, 2013 10:42 AM in response to James Ferguson

There's more to it. If a file is set to download rather than play, it may work in the iTunes application but it probably won't work in the Store. The test is that if you paste the URL into Safari it plays in Safari in an otherwise blank page, not in a player, and doesn't download.

But in any case evidently DropBox doesn't handle ' byte range requests', which are necessary for iPhones: the Store checks for this and will not accept podcasts whose media files are not hosted on a service with this facility.

Avoid Dropbox; it's excellent for file storage and syncing; it's not suitable for podcasting.

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