Podcast Problems
Posted in Podcast on: Saturday, April 21, 2007 by Paul Boag
I have received a number of emails recently complaining about various technical aspects of the podcast. Hopefully now they are all fixed.
Two problems in particular seem to have plagued people:
- iTunes continually marking everything as new
- Downloads of older episodes being painfully slow
Well, I have wasted most of my saturday working on these problems and this is what I have discovered.
Everything is new
When I sat down and really looked at the XML file I use for the podcast I discovered it was a mess. The code was invalid and it was littered with dead links and other problems. Feedburner had been doing its best to make something useable out of it but the odds were stacked against it. Some of the problems were due to sloppiness on my part but also some blame has to be leveled at FeedforAll the tool I had been using to create the feed. Anyway I have spent most of today rebuilding the entire feed from scratch and will only be editing it by hand from now on.
Slow Downloads
Now this problem is an area I could really start to rant over. If I had to boil it down to a single phrase it would be don’t use Fasthosts. When we first started using Fasthosts as our ISP it was back in the day before podcasting was around. There service offered no bandwidth cap and so it was the logical place to host the show. At some point over the intervening months they changes their T&Cs on me and one day contacted me saying that I would have to host the podcast elsewhere as it was eating 80GB per day! I have to say I cant blame them for that. 80GB is a hell of a lot of traffic and was a testament to the popularity of the show. We agreed that I would move away new episodes (which accounted for the vast majority of traffic) and that the older shows would stay where they were. This would reduce my bandwidth considerably. I set up with Libsyn who offer a superb service and I can highly recommend.
This should have been the end of the story however unfortunately it proved not to be. A few months later all of the older episodes just suddenly went offline. Fasthosts had pulled the plug with no warning whatsoever. After considerable shouting on my part they eventually reconnected me and this also should have been the end of things. However, a few days ago I started receiving email from people saying that the episodes on Fasthosts were taking 6-8 hours to download! In short they had throttled my bandwidth.
So in order to rectify this problem I have now left Fasthosts completely and moved the archive of shows across to Switchpod. I have 1GB of storage with them which covers most of my archive and they offer unlimited bandwidth. Unfortunately because I have maxed out my Switchpod account I have to stick with Libsyn for future shows (as they give me a set amount of storage each month). I say unfortunately because although Libsyn is great, Switchpod provides a much better user experience.
I need your help
Anyway the long and the short of all of this is that your problems should now be sorted… at least in principle. Of course I have just moved over a gigabytes work of shows from one provider to another, edited the feed for 75 shows and updated every link to an MP3 file on this website. The result is that something will be broken somewhere. If you spot it, please let me know.
Thanks.
13 Comments
Comments are for the discussion of this post. If you have other questions / comments then post them to the forum or send me an email
Thanks for taking the time to try to get these things sorted. It can’t have been a fun day, even if it was doing technical things! Hopefully everything will be good from now on.
A tip for those of you with older shows now downloading again: unsubscribe from the podcast, then resubscribe again.
I had always thought the feed was a little weird. Thanks for fixing it though. For some reason, iTunes would say that there were more episodes to download, even though I had them all. It wants to download a ‘Ghost’ copy. At least you’ve fixed it now =D
I have always blamed this problem on Amarok – my podcast fetcher! Good that you have finally fixed this. I had set special update times on the feed (every other week) to avoid having to deal with the problem…
Craig has just emailed me to say that episodes 50-53 were missing from the new feed in itunes. I have now fixed that but you might find you have to unsubscribe and add me again.
“wasted most of my saturday working on these problems”
I wouldn’t Say wasted :) I’m sure everyone appreciated your work in correcting that problem!
75 Shows is a big job to maintain – congratulations! Keep up the excellent work Paul.
FeedForAll works great, always creates valid code not sure what your problem was. Its much better than hand creating feeds IMO
Well that shows just how talented I am if I can break such a reliable piece of software :) All I can say is that was not my experience.
On another note; just to thank the people that pointed out that the descriptions were not appearing in itunes. This has now been fixed.
http://www.podcast411.com/howto_1.html
Glad to see you go to hand coding your feed – that is the only way to make sure it works correctly. Above is my tutorial on what needs to be in your feed and why. This includes the RSS 2.0 specs and the iTunes specs. Let me know if you need any additional help with the feed.
Rob @ podCast411
Thanks for all of your work on this Paul! I really appreciate and enjoy your podcast! Keep up the great work!
When I saw the introduction (or subheader or whatever it is called), I was hoping that you had fixed a recent problem I have had. Unfortunately, you had not, so here it is:
Last week, I downloaded the boagworld podcast. I copied it to my MP3 player (Grundig MP 650) and tried to play it. It didn’t work. I had to re-encode it on my computer before the MP3-player would play it.
I thought it was a one-time-problem, but then I downloaded the last .net magazine podcast and that one had the same problem.
It does play on my computer though, so the real problem is probably that my MP3-player doesn’t support the way you encode it. If my player doesn’t support it, there are probably lots of other players that don’t support it either, so If you have recently changed the way you encode the podcasts and it doesn’t have any big advantage over the old way, it would be nice if you could switch back.
>Anyway I have spent most of today rebuilding the entire feed from scratch and will only be editing it by hand from now on.
Why not use some kind of a self-built script to generate it from your DB? By doing that, you decrease the chance of human errors, and because you have written it yourself you know that it will generate a valid feed.
To decrease the bandwidth usage in the future so that you don’t get similar problems, you could do what they are doing at hanselminutes: Offer a bittorrent feed in addition to the normal one.
I’m not sure it has anything to do with this, but I recently had the double entries problem in the .net magazine podcast (using Opera). I resubscribed to the show, and now the first show is missing. Personally, I don’t care, I have already downloaded it, but just a litle notice in case the problem is in the feed and not in me or Opera.
Sorry for my bad english. :)
And by the way, thank you for the great show! Boring work gets fun when I listen to your podcasts. Keep up the great work!
I redownloaded the three most recent shows (one at a time). I spent over an hour on each of the shows on my 20 000 kbps connection. I have never had to spend this much time on a single download before. I think you should do something with the transfer speed as well, Paul… Or offer an alternate Feed+Torrent channel!
It will be interesting to see if other people experience a similar problem Daniel. I have done a lot of stress testing on the new hosting company and it is downloading extremely fast as far as I can tell. Might be a problem elsewhere Daniel.