Frequently Asked Questions - Feed updates and Downloads
Some feeds include invalid characters or are in an improper form. This can sometimes cause the feed parser to fail.
You can verify that your feed is in the proper form here - Feed Validator
Getting help
If you are unable to resolve the issue, please post in the support forum. Please include the RSS URL and a detailed description of what you are experiencing.
Feed update failures and download failure usually have different causes but you can use the same approach to do some general diagnosis on either.
You can also see all failures by pressing on 'Application Log' in the menu on the feeds screen. This will list all of the successes and failures for feed updates and downloads. Pressing on a row in the list will display the details of the failure.
Alternatively, you can press on the 'details' link on the feed (if it's a feed update problem) or on the item (if it's a download problem).
In the details, there are two parts to pay attention to:
1 - Details - this is the error message and will usually give a good indication of what the problem is
2 - Cause - this is DoggCatcher's guess at what the error was caused by based on past errors.
Common error messages
Illegal character in hostname at index...
The feed or media files are stored on a server with a hostname that is not allowed by the Android networking software.
Task killers
Some users have reported that task killers are killing DC and causing updates/downloads to fail.
Getting help
If you are unable to resolve the issue, please post in the support forum. Please include the RSS URL and a detailed description of what you are experiencing.
DoggCatcher will only auto-download the media for new items. So DoggCatcher thinks that the item is new.
Sometimes, feed publishers change the title of the items. By default, DoggCatcher uses the item title to determine uniqueness for an item. So if an item changes its title, DoggCatcher will remove the old item (deleting the media) and add the new item. In this case the media will be downloaded again.
You can tell this is happening if you have items that are marked as done and then after a feed update, they then re-appear new.
Most often this can be fixed by changing the 'item identifier' feed option for the feed to one of the other values. The GUID option is the best choice to start with, but the one that works depends on the feed.
Yes, DoggCatcher supports feeds that require authentication. The feed must support standard http authentication (most do).
Identify the feed URL for the feed in question and paste the feed URL into a browser. This URL is what DoggCatcher will load to display the feed.
Feed description
You should see a description of the feed at the top.
Number of items
If you expect to see a particular item in DoggCatcher but it is missing, verify that it is in the feed. Some feeds only publish items going back so far while some feeds only publish one item.
Audio files
There should be links to audio files next to each item.
If what you see looks like a normal web page without the structure that is described above, it's probably not an RSS URL, but you may be able to locate the RSS URL on that page or close by.
DoggCatcher supports feeds in RSS format, which is the most common format used for podcasts.
There are more details here is the RSS url section about how to obtain a feed URL which is how you tell DoggCatcher the 'address' of the podcast.
DoggCatcher does not support Atom or ITunes format, although Atom support will be added in the future.
Some feeds publish items out of order. For these feeds, enabling the 'Full fetch' feed option resolves this problem.
You may also need to set the item sort order feed option to date (newest first).
Try running the feed diagnostics in the context menu for a feed. It will display a message if this type of feed is detected.
Some feeds only keep a certain number of items published.
The first thing to do is to check what items are available in the feed by pasting the feed URL into a browser. Try to find the item that you are looking for.
If it's not there, then the publisher has removed that item from the feed.
If it is there but it is not available in DoggCatcher, let me know and I'll look into it.
During normal usage, one would usually want to listen to older items first. DoggCatcher will download the oldest items that are flagged as 'New', up to the number configured in the 'Auto Download' feed option.
When creating new feeds, all items but the most recent are flagged as old so that the most recent will be the first available.
You can flag any items as 'Done' that you don't want to have downloaded.
This happens when you update a feed, then later when another update occurs, the newly fetched feed is older than the original.
This has happened for me when I update a feed on wifi, then later update over the cell network. Sometimes data is cached (my theory at least) on the carriers proxy servers so you don't get the new version of the feed. You can confirm this is happening to you by opening the feed in the Android browser and you'll probably be seeing the old version of the feed.
You can add a YouTube many different types of feed from YouTube. To add a YouTube feed, add a feed as RSS URL. You can learn about how to create YouTube urls here.
There are a few different things that can cause mobile traffic with this setting.
-Limiting downloads to "wifi only" will prevent downloads from *starting* until your device is connected to a wifi network. If a download is started on Wifi, and then your device is disconnected from the Wifi network, the download will continue on the mobile network.
-If you Stream on one of the episodes while on mobile, it will use mobile data.
-When browsing news in the app, DoggCatcher will load images in the news content over the mobile network.
On some networks, users need to authenticate from a browser on their device to allow the device to connect to the internet. If DoggCatcher tries to download a media file prior to the authentication and the authentication proxy does not return a proper response code indicating that it was unable to provide the file, DoggCatcher will save whatever the proxy responds with. In this case, there really isn't any way for DoggCatcher to easily distinguish between a real media file and a bogus HTML response.
There are some ideas in this post that we'll probably work into DoggCatcher to work around the problem.
This can be cause by ad blocker software.
See this post - http://www.doggcatcher.com/node/1067#comment-4950
Some feeds have dates for the items that are not in the proper format so they can be parsed. You can tell this is happening by pressing on the feed. You should see a date on each item. If there is no date displayed, then the date is not in the proper format required.