Some shows are inexplicably "not available".

[TartanSpartan]

For example if you search for The Young Turks and try to subscribe to the newest iteration of their show (see screenshot to see which one I mean) you can subscribe but the episodes are wholly absent. Hence the "not available" under a "last updated" section which shows an episode came out yesterday. This is despite the fact that it's available and subscribe-able on the Podbean app, Apple Podcasts, Audible, etc. This issue is shared with the original Podbird app, and present on all Ubuntu Touch devices I've tested on, but it wasn't always the case.

I'll add comments if I discover any other shows for which the ability to subscribe is oddly absent.

[TartanSpartan]

Per https://github.com/ilyakooo0/podphoenix/issues/22 I had to manually backport the latest version of Podphoenix to Xenial. I believe I did this adequately, but upon installing the resultant click, I once again attempted to subscribed to The Young Turks (in fact, any podcast on The Young Turks network appears to fail to be available) and could not. I've asked on Telegram if anyone can subscribe on the Focal version, but whether they can or can't, I feel I must ask if the development team indeed attempted to subscribe to the show (and verified that as such) before pushing this change and deeming the issue closed?

[maciek134]

This is an issue with the iTunes API / whatever podcast authors put there. For example

https://itunes.apple.com/search?term=Adeptus&media=podcast&entity=podcast

returns this feedUrl for the first podcast (the one I'm searching for):

https://anchor.fm/s/dc36d0bc/podcast/rss

But that returns 404 - possibly related to Spotify owning the domain now

[TartanSpartan]

Hmm, I will attempt to contact the show's technical team to address this.

[maciek134]

That's not a very good idea, we might as well be using a field that's no longer present in the Apple Podcasts UI

[maciek134]

@ilyakooo0 this can be used to look up episodes using the iTunes API too:

https://itunes.apple.com/lookup?id=<collectionId>&country=US&media=podcast&entity=podcastEpisode&limit=100

where collectionId is taken from the iTunes /search API. This includes episodeUrl which can be used to download the track. Somehow this works for the podcast I'm testing on, even though it points to a url on anchor.fm that redirects to cloudfront (I guess Spotify didn't break these)

It will also happily accept a limit of 1000, could be used as a fallback when the feedUrl 404s.

[TartanSpartan]

So are you saying that using this URL to subscribe to a feed URL in Podphoenix:

https://itunes.apple.com/lookup?id=597919007&country=US&media=podcast&entity=podcastEpisode&limit=100

(with that ID corresponding to the show) should work to subscribe to the show? Because it doesn't for me.

[maciek134]

No, that's not what I said. I suggested a solution to fix this in the app, that URL is useless to you as a user.

[TartanSpartan]

Ok, the clarification is useful.

[maciek134]

Actually this one was a completely different issue, the exact podcast you mention has a working feed URL but it was breaking due to a redirect - fixed in the PR linked above.

[TartanSpartan]

Heroic work, and thank you! But, do you know why only a handful of episodes (from the past week or so) are available for download?

[maciek134]

If you want the full list you have to go to the this podcast in the Podcasts submenu and refresh there, not sure if on purpose but refreshing in the main screen will only save a couple of latest episodes.