Hi, I hit an issue today after publishing the first episode after switching to Podlove and I’m not sure how (or if) it is solvable.
My site is on Wordpress, using Podlove Publisher and Web Player 5 and the media files for the podcast are hosted on aCast.
The episode that published today on Wordpress had a broken player because the media file could not be found according to the player. The URL was correct in the backend but aCast doesn’t make the file discoverable until publish time so the media file cannot be verified in Publisher until after it is released on aCast.
Is there a way around this (edge?) case? Going in after the fact and hitting verify clears everything up but that’s not ideal. Can we verify on WP publish? Cron job or other magic or maybe I just missed some setting. Thanks!
ETA: Just had a thought. Does PLP actually try to verify on WP publish but I had set WP and aCast to publish at the exact same time so it is possible the aCast media file took a couple more minutes to be accessible and that’s why it failed?
FWIW, the problem persisted on the next episode which published today. I had a 15m difference between the file host ‘releasing’ the episode and Wordpress publishing. Is there any solution to this?
Hi, indeed the Publisher expects media files to be publicly readable before the episode is published. You could surely hack together a cron job to work around this. If you programmatically get the episode, you can call $episode->refetch_files();. (podlove-publisher/episode.php at beta · podlove/podlove-publisher · GitHub)
Curious that this is the first time (as far as I remember) that this issue comes up. I wonder how common it is that the file may not be accessible before the episode publication.
I’m flattered you think I can do that
I understand what a cron job is but I’d never know how to do any of that setup or customization.
FWIW, this is the way aCast does it for all their shows on the service but they are definitely the outlier. You get the URL it will be at but it is not public until published on aCast.
Anyway, as long as there’s not more demand I don’t think an official solution will find its way into the plugin any time soon. There are just too many higher priority tasks.
