[geeks] Plopcasting

[Dwight Wallbridge]

As a podcaster myself, I only recently learned the trick to this. Before 
you upload the file, you need to add the image in iTunes itself. I found 
this out from the Podcast 411 site[1] article linked below. It also 
allows you to add a little more to the ID3 for iTunes. It's a little 
tedious, but can be fairly quick from file to file once you have the 
swing of things. Cheers.

[1]http://www.podcast411.com/id3tags.html second section.



Dwight Wallbridge,
geekblog.net
dwightwallbridge.com
dwightwallbridge.com/photo/
geekblog.net/geekcast/


Jonathan C. Patschke wrote:
> 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.