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[Claude Lapalme]

CBC offers this podcast that updates hourly, however, this is the only podcast that never updates; not only doesn’t it update hourly, but it actually never updates. I fiddled around the settings to no avail. Is there something I’m missing, or is there someone else experiencing this?

[RedJ]

I also have this problem with another hourly news update podcast feed.  The feed will regularly (usually within a day or so) stop updating.  The fix for this is to select and delete all podcasts in the feed, which will then leave one outdated podcast for some reason that also needs to be deleted and then the feed will immediately update with a new podcast again. 

My educated guess is that there's a logic error somewhere in MC's default method and/or timing when retrieving frequently updated feeds that causes it to stop updating that feed.  I haven't played around with the podcast checking and download frequency settings to see if I can confirm this, though, since they're universal instead of on a per-feed basis.

[RedJ]

My educated guess is that there's a logic error somewhere in MC's default method and/or timing when retrieving frequently updated feeds that causes it to stop updating that feed. 

I think I've confirmed this as, if not technically a bug, probably unwanted behavior given a certain set of circumstances more likely to occur with frequently updated feeds such as news updates.  I changed my global podcast settings "Attempt each download at most" from the default 3 times to 99 and my previously problematic news feed has continued to work properly for the past two days, which is a significantly longer span than I've been seeing. (BTW- My other global settings are the default Check every 60 minutes & Retry in 5)

Since I don't necessarily think jacking up global download attempts this high is going to be a good general solution for everyone, it would be nice if the devs could take a look at this one sometime and see if this isn't something that could be fixed more elegantly.

[JimH]

When we've "fixed" these kinds of problems in the past, they were often because the podcasts had illegal formats for the dates.

[Claude Lapalme]

Thanks all for the info. It's not a immense issue for as I don't often listen to those podcasts through MC, but it's good to know where the problems arise from, and hear of potential workarounds.

[RedJ]

I use MC heavily for podcast listening, so I'm invested in this more than average, I guess 

Jim,

That may be- I'm no expert on RSS xml.  However, the pubDate property (if that's the one in question) in the CBC feed and my example both appear to be legal and precisely match the formatting used by a number of fully functioning feeds in my list.  The biggest difference I see is that these hourly news feeds have a single episode per feed and replace the entire feed every update as opposed to appending another episode to a list.  Perhaps there's something about it that creates confusion for MC.  If one views the problematic feeds in a browser http://www.cbc.ca/podcasting/includes/hourlynews.xml you'll see only one episode listed yet in MC I get a list of past episodes no longer in the feed, even though I've set the feed to download and keep only the newest episode.

Not a huge deal since I found a workaround, but something to maybe add as a med-low priority thing to investigate.