Hi eric,
I noticed if you have a queue of podcasts and one fails it trips the entire queue. Can it be fixed so that a failed podcast is skipped after the 5th try? Also, what are the main reasons for a podcast to fail? How would you troubleshoot when this occurs?
Thanks,
Chris
Episodes should fail independently with 5 retries each before giving up. What you are describing sounds like a bug because it should be doing what you are suggesting.
Most failures are a result of either communication errors over the network or feed parsing errors. Feed parsing errors are constrained to a particular Podcast, but we can usually work around these types of problems if the Podcast URL is posted.
Yeah, it must be a bug because one failure always trips the entire queue for me and always has.
What does it mean when you get a Partial Download? Those don't seem to trip the queue and occur sporadically (but frequently) on various podcasts, particularly: http://redbarradio.com/rbr.xml
I just tested this and it's working fine for me, can you explain a bit more what you mean my "trip the queue". Is anyone else experiencing this?
I put 10 episodes in the download queue, went to the view queue screen, while one was downloading, i broke the internet connection. I could see the retries going 2...3....4....5...give up. It was removed from the queue, then the next episode tried to download. Is this the same type of scenario you are describing?
Partial downloads happen when a feed reports a file to be size 71.5MB for example (as in the case of redbar), but the actual file is smaller than that. We download the 71.5, it completes, then we compare the size we have to what we expect and it looks like we are missing some. It used to be the case that you couldn't play these, but now you can play partial from the long-press menu. This is probably what's happening to you.
Strangely enough, the problem seems to have subsided over the last couple of days. When it did happen, a podcast would fail after the 5th attempt and doggcatcher wouldn't attempt to download anything else in the queue. I will report back if I encounter this problem again. By the way, the only change I can think I've made, is turning off the "begin downloads only when on WIFI". Not sure if that fixed it somehow but wanted to provide any info that might help.
I'll check it out. Thanks for all the details.
No problem. Quick question, how do I get doggcatcher to update and DOWNLOAD all new episodes, instead of needing to go through each one manually? Is that function available? If not can we have a "update AND download all new podcasts" option added at the home screen?
Long press on the podcast an set the max download number to something greater than 0. A few seconds after an update, the new episodes should be added to the queue.
Thanks eric. These problems all seem to be resolved.