[geeks] Plopcasting

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

A while back I wrote a little shell script that pulls down my favorite
Internet radio shows and generates an XML index that iTunes understands
as a podcast.  Since then, a radio station has asked me to install this
on one of their machines[0] so that they can offer archives of past
shows.

This works great right up until the point when I want to add artwork
(like Inside Mac has) with the personalities' mugshots and station
identification.

I've tried this:

    <image>
      <title>Talking Head</title>
      <url>http://www.zomgtehradeostation.zzz/artwork/mugshot.png</url>
      <link>http://www.zomgtehradeostation.zzz/</link>
    </image>

  I've tried this:

    <itunes:image
      href="http://www.zomgtehradeostation.zzz/artwork/mugshot.png" />

  I've tried this:

    <itunes:link rel="image" type="image/png"
      href="http://www.zomgtehradeostation.zzz/artwork/mugshot.png" />

I've tried this:

    <itunes:image rel="image"
      href="http://www.zomgtehradeostation.zzz/artwork/mugshot.png" />

And, out of desparation, I've tried this:

    <itunes:image>
      <title>Talking Head</title>
      <url>http://www.zomgtehradeostation.zzz/artwork/mugshot.png</url>
      <link>http://www.zomgtehradeostation.zzz/</link>
    </itunes:image>

Things I've checked and found not to be the problem (or, at least didn't
make the problem go away once changed):

   1) Encoding was originally Latin-1.  Is now UTF-8[1].
   2) Images were originally 110x110.  Are now 220x220
   3) Images were originally 8bpp.  Are now 24bpp
   4) Originally used both RSS and iTunes image specifications.  Now
      using only one.
   5) Images were originally JFIFs.  Are now PNGs.
   6) Have successfully validated via feedvalidator.
   7) Have tried using MSDOS or Macintosh line-endings rather than Unixy
      ones.
   8) Have tried moving the web server to port 80 to see if iTunes
      doesn't want to load images from strange ports.
   9) Have verified that files are actually readble from said web server
      via a browser.
  10) iTunes namespace is imported in the rss tag.
  11) Have tried iTunes on both a PC and another Macintosh.

iTunes, of course, gives no useful feedback; it just sees no artwork
attached to the channel.  This alone has cost me hours, because I've no
clue what to attack.  Does anyone have an idea of where I might be
screwing up?

I'm looking at a working feed (the one from Inside Mac), and I can't see
what I could possibly be doing differently.

The POS Windows box running IIS sitting between me and the feed-capture
server (running BSD) isn't helping any.  The BSD box exports the
directories containing the XML and MP3 files via Samba, but if Weird
Things happen while IIS is spewing out the file, one side or the other
loses its lunch.  IIS refuses to reopen files, or reopens them but
doesn't see that their sizes have changed (which makes for REALLY
interesting XML).  Shutting down Samba long enough for IIS to drop the
SMB session seems to flush that problem.

Gah.  PC wankers and their stupid broken software.  DETH.


[0] Well, it ended up going on a retired system that is now running
     OpenBSD, because I figured that cron + mplayer + cygwin would cause
     nothing but pain.
[1] For all that it matters, as iTunes specifically says that only
     character values <= 255 are recognized.
-- 
Jonathan Patschke  ) "Buy the best there is, because it's sorry enough."
Elgin, TX         (                                      --Henry Zuehlke