Podcast "playback failed"

I've tried:

Rebooting, not work.

Deleting podcast app, reloading podcast app, not work.

Deleted all podcasts, downloaded again, worked!

Good luck.

Thanks mate, this has worked for me. Delete offending old podcasts and redownload.

The only fix I've found is to delete and reload the 'bad' podcast file. That doesn't always work. Or it works for a while before the same error appears.

It's annoying with one or two bad podcasts. It was a real headache when I lost hours of content downloaded for a long road trip. First, I was driving so couldn't safely tap and download podcasts. Second, I didn't want to burn data to download what I'd already downloaded via wifi. It took nearly a half hour to go through the app, delete the 'bad' podcasts and reload.

So far I have found that the podcasts will only play if downloaded through the app. As soon as my phone connects to iTunes on my laptop and syncs, they all stop playing with the same error. I have just removed the podcasts from the sync option and will see if that helps. But now i have to re-download all 20 podcasts when I get home 😟

I am also finding a lot of my songs just 'skip' when playig, so iTunes has made a massive mess up somewhere.

😠

I've said for YEARS that iTunes is the single WORST piece of software devised by man. Monkeys at a keyboard could've done better. I am NOT getting rid of my podcasts. What I MIGHT do is get rid of IOS7 on my 4s. Doesn't Apple TEST their releases anymore?

It's not ios7. I am on 6.1.2 and had the problem. It's also not the version of iTunes as I hadn't upgraded when I had the problem.

Oh great. So not even Apple knows what it is. I just began having the problem TODAY. I just followed the usual upgrade path and bammo. No podcasts.