Topic: podcast problems

I'm having some podcast problems on my Chumby (latest beta CP 2.8.36).

All the New York Times podcasts stop abruptly after 3 1/2 to 4 minutes.

Also, the 1st CBS News podcast ("What's in the News") is never updated. It's played the same "Airline mergers" story for months.

-LloydM

"It's Chumbological!"

Re: podcast problems

We're looking into the NYT Podcasts issue.  We haven't changed anything, so we're not sure what's going on.  The streams are served by them, not us.

I've verified that CBS hasn't updated the "What's in the News" feed since April 2008, so it appears to have been abandoned by them.  We'll remove that feed or find a replacement.

Re: podcast problems

That CBS podcast has been removed, and the Fantasy Football and Baseball podcasts are now updated.

Re: podcast problems

Thanks!

  BTW after a CBS or NYT podcast plays, older ones play immediately afterward, instead of just the latest version playing. Is this a bug or expected behavior?

-LloydM

"It's Chumbological!"

Re: podcast problems

That's the way it works - it simply steps through each item in podcast feeds.  In most cases, they're progressively older broadcasts of the same category, but that's not always the case.  It's hard to know what to do here - some people *want* to hear the older stuff, and in some cases, like the science stuff, it's not actually time sensitive.

Re: podcast problems

We've identified the problem with NYT Podcasts - they did indeed change something which is causing this problem.

We're working on a fix.

7 (edited by damack1 2009-09-25 18:17:00)

Re: podcast problems

Thanks for looking into this. I've noticed the problem too. Just about the time I'm getting interested in TechTalk or the books podcast, it cuts out on me. I hope you'll be able to fix it.

Re: podcast problems

Has there been any progress on the NYT podcasts? I think I seem the same issue with some others, as well.

Re: podcast problems

As we've said, this has been confirmed as a problem on the NYT servers - they simply timeout after a few minutes.  There's nothing we can do on our end - so far they've been unable to remedy it on their end.

If you're seeing this on any of the other podcast audio sources, we'd be interested, since it's probably unrelated.

Re: podcast problems

Oh. In you last message in this thread, you said you were working on a fix. Maybe you mentioned the timeout problem in a different thread.

Re: podcast problems

Sorry, upon reading my previous posts, I guess my wording was poor - we were working with them on a fix.

Re: podcast problems

This is a serious problem. Why is there a time-out? Can't the Chumby simply cache the roughly 5 Megabyte MP3 podcast in RAM and play it out for its full length?

Please find a solution to this problem!

THanks

Re: podcast problems

We don't know why there's a timeout - it's on their servers.  We agree it's a serious problem but it's completely out of our control.

We could try to download the file to RAM and play it from there, assuming that the files are small enough that we don't use it all up, but that would mean it could take a while for the stream to start.

The device only has 64MB of RAM - it's pretty much used up doing what it does without also caching podcasts.

The solution is for the server to get fixed - which is something we can't do.

Re: podcast problems

NYT podcasts are working now (both direct and via Mediafly). Thanks for getting this fixed.

-LloydM

"It's Chumbological!"