Podcasts of unknown length

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Podcasts of unknown length

New postby gahoo on Tue Feb 10, 2009 1:21 pm

This is an admittedly minor bug/issue.

I am subscribed to 11 podcasts - 9 of the feeds show the individual podcast length perfectly. 2 do not. They download fine, play fine - and the length shows after I start listening, but after it is downloaded and before I start the podcast it shows "???". Is this a podtrapper bug or something on the podcast side? The two feeds I have with this problem are WNYC's Radio Lab (http://www/wnyc.org/shows/radiolab.index.xml) and CNET's Buzz Out Loud (http://feeds.feedburner.com/cnet/buzzoutloud?format=xml).
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Re: Podcasts of unknown length

New postby countstex on Tue Feb 10, 2009 4:46 pm

I've noticed that too, but I've not really looked into it as it doesn't cause me a problem. But just so you know you are not alone.
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Re: Podcasts of unknown length

New postby marwatk on Tue Feb 10, 2009 5:02 pm

Hi guys,

It's actually a bit of both. Some (most?) podcasts report a duration as part of the feed, when they do PodTrapper displays it. If not, PodTrapper has no way of knowing how long they are without feeding them to the player, but when they are fed through the player the player reports back on how long it thinks they are, and PodTrapper goes off of that. Until then, though, it displays the "???" thing because it doesn't know.

I could feed everything that doesn't have a duration through the player after downloading, but it would add a lot of complexity (and bugs) with little gain, so I haven't so far.


Hope this helps, let me know if you have additional thoughts.

-Marcus
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Re: Podcasts of unknown length

New postby gahoo on Wed Feb 11, 2009 2:40 pm

marwatk wrote:let me know if you have additional thoughts.

Understood. What about an estimate based on mb downloaded. From what I can tell 1mb-> ~1min is close enough. This should be sufficient, as some podcasts where the length can vary in length from 2 minutes to 2 hours. When podtrapper is doing the estimation it could be reported as "~20:00"
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Re: Podcasts of unknown length

New postby marwatk on Wed Feb 11, 2009 7:43 pm

Hi there, the only problem with that is PodTrapper can't [easily] tell whether it's an audio or video podcast, so it could end up being way off. What I may do instead of displaying ??? is put the size in MB of the podcast there. That will at least give some indication of what you're dealing with.

-Marcus
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