[wp-hackers] Multiple Enclosures, detecting enclosures

Chris Lott chris.lott at gmail.com
Fri Jul 29 00:49:10 GMT 2005


On 7/28/05, Robert Deaton <false.hopes at gmail.com> wrote:
> iTunes is by far, the best and the worst thing to happen to
> podcasting. Its the best in the sense that its raising public
> awareness of podcasting, but the worst in the way that it handles
> podcasts. So, to be frank, iTunes is broken.

That's what I suspected. Do you have any references to which part of
the specification iTunes is ignoring? I've seen a hack to make
multiple enclosures work with iTunes, so it must not be grokking some
part correctly.

And is it the only podcast aggregator that fails on them?
 
> As for detecting based on headers, I would stand by this as being the
> best way because servers are supposed to send the right headers, and
> its hard to account for all possible media types and all the different
> ways servers may be broken. Honestly, if your server isn't sending the
> right headers for simple media types like mp3, you're damn lucky its
> up and running at all.

*MY* servers do-- the problem is that so many don't. And when the best
free resource (important in educational circles) is ourmedia.org-- and
THEY can't (or won't) figure it out-- it seems like a bigger problem.
I also didn't ask to accommodate all possible media types, just the
most common ones that are causing the most problems.

It would just be nice, I guess, if there were an option to help deal
with things that are so commonly broken. Standing on principles is
great, but results and working products are often useful too.

c


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