Podcast subscription problem

[easye]

I've been using MM for about a year and a half now and have a Gold license. I really think it is a great product.

I've now upgraded to the new MM3 and have been trying out the new podcasting / podcatching features. All of my audio podcast feeds seem to be working correctly. However, I have a few video podcast feeds that don't download or show anything. I already know that MM can not sync video. However, I was hoping I could at least use MM as my sole podcatcher. I hate to have to go into iTunes to get the few video podcasts I subscribe to.

The thing that is a bit confusing for me is that some of the video podcast feeds download correctly. Here are some examples:

This feed downloads correctly (mp4 file extension):
http://www.podshow.com/feeds/geekbrief.xml

This feed doesn't (m4v file extension):
http://revision3.com/diggnation/feed/quicktime-small

Is it possible the first one works because an mp4 file can be video or audio (I think )?

BTW, when I subscribe to the diggnation podcast, the information about Title and Description is pulled from the web correctly:

However, when I then hit OK nothing at all shows up in the details pane.

Any suggestions?

Thanks.

[Ludek]

Yes, I see your point.

Unfortunately MediaMonkey downloads only episodes which extensions are associated, defined in Options -> File Types

I will add your request to our bug tracking system for review whether we should change this to download all files although they cannot be played by MM.

[easye]

Yes, I see your point.

Unfortunately MediaMonkey downloads only episodes which extensions are associated, defined in Options -> File Types

I will add your request to our bug tracking system for review whether we should change this to download all files although they cannot be played by MM.

Thanks.

[rusty]

Won't this just cause a lot of confusion for most users? i.e. people will end up downloading stuff into their libraries that they can't play or can't sync with MM.

Anyone else have thoughts on this? Doesn't seem like a high priority item to me until we add more video support into MM.

I did have one thought:
What if MM did download such tracks, but didn't save them to the library...

-Rusty

[easye]

Won't this just cause a lot of confusion for most users? i.e. people will end up downloading stuff into their libraries that they can't play or can't sync with MM.

Anyone else have thoughts on this? Doesn't seem like a high priority item to me until we add more video support into MM.

I did have one thought:
What if MM did download such tracks, but didn't save them to the library...

-Rusty

I agree, it shouldn't be a high priority and will probably cause some confusion. My only hope was to use MM as my only podcatcher. But I can see how more problems would be caused then solved by doing this until there is some video support in MM.

[mthomas]

I ran into this issue in the same way as the original poster - trying to use MM as the one and only podcatcher on my system. Even though MM can't play video podcasts, it can manage them for me: It can download video podcasts from the feed and then sync them to my device where I can watch them.

While it might be confusing to some users to download podcasts they can't view in MM, I've got to say I found it very confusing that MM would download some video podcasts and not others.

By the way... great product!

[Owyn]

I have been wrestling with the same issue.

Working approach is to use a separate podcatch client for video casts. Probably Juice. I can set a separate downloads directory and play from there using VLC. Not as one stop or integrated as iTunes, but, workable for my relatively small number of video casts.

Single podcatch client is still preferred.

@Rusty: Downloading non-playable could work if the episodes were flagged in some way. Perhaps an icon prefixing the item Title.

[IwI]

I second adding support for other rss feeds. I would recommend just making it an option you have to enable ( disabled by default as to not confuse the commoners. )

I figured Diggnation has been behind on putting out new episodes only to discover its not supported in MediaMonkey ( the best damn audio software available ).

[jwadle22]

has there been any "headway" made on adding support for m4v files.. I am like a few others that only want MM to download the files, so I can sync them to my device. I actually did a test and renamed a m4v file to mp4, and sure enough MM was able to play it (minus the video of course) so it does indeed support it.. I seems as simple as allowing the m4v extension.. but I am FAR from a programmer..

BTW great product, it was worth the 20 bucks for the gold..

[clambert11]

I'm trying to do the same thing. Get MM to download video RSS feeds from Revision3.

I tried modifying the ini file by adding the extension I wanted to download, but that proved fruitless. As soon as MM opened it wiped out the changes I made to the extension lists. Can't say I was shocked.

Anyone know of some sort of half-assed hack that we can do to force MM to download other extensions?

Running another ap isn't something I really want to do. I miss the days of when Revision3 used to support BitTorrent downloads. uTorrent's Auto Downloader worked fantastic for this.

[Locutus]

I'm in the same boat. I've been frustrated for years by the lack of any good podcatchers for Windows (I've played around with probably over a dozen different ones but none seem to work for me) and I thought my prayers had finally been answered when I found out about MediaMonkey recently -- I REALLY love this program, it's far and away the best podcatcher out there. It's stable, it's not a resource hog, it's gorgeous-looking with a fantastic UI, it synchs with my portable media player and it even supports plug-ins, skins and scripts.

However, a good number of my podcasts use the m4v format, so MM is unusable for me if it doesn't at least recognise the existence of m4v files and lets me download them. I watch/listen to about 40 hours worth of podcasts a week, it's worth more than the €40 for a MM gold account to me if I could get at least basic m4v support for it.

[nohitter151]

I'm in the same boat. I've been frustrated for years by the lack of any good podcatchers for Windows (I've played around with probably over a dozen different ones but none seem to work for me) and I thought my prayers had finally been answered when I found out about MediaMonkey recently -- I REALLY love this program, it's far and away the best podcatcher out there. It's stable, it's not a resource hog, it's gorgeous-looking with a fantastic UI, it synchs with my portable media player and it even supports plug-ins, skins and scripts.

However, a good number of my podcasts use the m4v format, so MM is unusable for me if it doesn't at least recognise the existence of m4v files and lets me download them. I watch/listen to about 40 hours worth of podcasts a week, it's worth more than the €40 for a MM gold account to me if I could get at least basic m4v support for it.

MM currently does not support video files but video support will be added in the future (possibly version 4.0)

[Guest]

I personally don't even care if MM supports video in terms of playing/tagging/whatever (although that *would* be nice). For the issue discussed in this thread we really only need .m4v to be recognised as a supported file type so that it will actually download such files off of RSS feeds -- I do the actual watching with my own media player anyway.

[nohitter151]

I personally don't even care if MM supports video in terms of playing/tagging/whatever (although that *would* be nice). For the issue discussed in this thread we really only need .m4v to be recognised as a supported file type so that it will actually download such files off of RSS feeds -- I do the actual watching with my own media player anyway.

Well I certainly understand where you're coming from, but I'm sure you can agree that it isn't very user friendly if MM offers to download video podcasts but then cannot play/tag/or synchronize the files to a portable player - and would be very confusing for many users.

As I said, I'm sure this will come in a future version of MM.

[Locutus]

Well, it isn't very user-friendly either that I had to muck around for hours to figure out why certain video feeds were working fine, why others were completely blank, and yet others were showing some downloads but not others...

At the rate at which MM is seems to have stable releases I suspect 4.0 is still gonna be a long, long way off... (Which in itself is not a bad thing, too many companies rush out buggy releases, but as a podcatcher is MM is so close, yet so far away... and the only product on the market that is this close to being usable.)

I imagine adding m4v to the supported file extensions list would probably be a fairly simple addition for a patch; if there's a risk of that confusing other users it could be made optional and turned off by default... Ideally I'd like to see an option to at least show and download any unsupported RSS enclosures for podcasts, not just m4v specifically. That way MM could download PDFs or other files that people will occasionally dump into podcast feeds as well -- right now MM doesn't even acknowledge such files even exist. Of course, I wouldn't expect MM to be able to open unknown files, but at least let me know they're there so I can manually access them with another program (that would also make MM a proper podcatcher rather than the ugly hack it essentially is now, effective as it may be for most file formats). I'd settle for just making a special case out of m4v though, that covers probably 99% of the currently unsupported RSS enclosures.

(For clarity, that guest post was me BTW, forgot to enter the username)