PocketCasts stopped querying mp4 feed, don't know how to re-enable it

Podlove Publisher
1

Hi there,

first of all sorry - I’m not quite sure if this is a bug in PocketCasts or a Problem with the feed/site/podlove itself that leads to this behavior in pocketcasts… Anyhow - I don’t know how to solve the problem and I guess that it can be solved by changing some feed-content or maybe someone already had the same problem.

But first things first: We’re producing the devcouch.de podcast Our Main-Feed is located at: DevCouch - this feed is registered with iTunes. We also have an additional mp3 Feed at DevCouch .

From our Server-Logs we can see that Pocket Casts was using the mp4 Feed till [24/Oct/2017:06:59:12 +0200. From that time on it started to only query the mp3 Feed:

From /log/access_log

45.79.137.247 - - [24/Oct/2017:06:59:12 +0200] “GET /feed/mp4/ HTTP/1.1” 200 9294 “-” “PocketCasts/1.0 (Pocket Casts Feed Parser; +http://pocketcasts.com/)” devcouch.de

…

45.79.183.98 - - [24/Oct/2017:07:11:44 +0200] “GET /feed/mp3/ HTTP/1.1” 200 9288 “-” “PocketCasts/1.0 (Pocket Casts Feed Parser; +http://pocketcasts.com/)” devcouch.de

45.33.75.134 - - [24/Oct/2017:07:12:01 +0200] “GET /feed/mp3/ HTTP/1.1” 200 9288 “-” “PocketCasts/1.0 (Pocket Casts Feed Parser; +http://pocketcasts.com/)” devcouch.de

This leads to a problem: When subscribing to our podcast by using the search inside the pocketcast app it is using content based upon the mp4 feed by default, so new episodes won’t get shown.
Strange enough: All other podcast clients are still pulling the mp4 feed and do work well.

As far as I remember we did not change anything at this special date, we’ve released a new epsiode a few days later.

My question is:

  1. Any idea why the Pocket Casts Feed Parser suddenly stopped refreshing the mp4/aac and switched to the mp3 feed?
  2. I heard that it is possible to use some meta-tag inside the mp3 Feed to force clients to switch the feed, how can I do this in podlove?

Thanks a lot in advance!,
Manuel

2

After having read some tickets in your github-repo I created a redirect from the mp3 feed to the mp4 feed - lets see what happens…

3

Okay - I did receive Feedback from the PocketCast Authors, the problem is not related to podlove.

The reason seems to be a handshake-failure between our server and the pocket-cast crawling service. They are currently using Java 8 for the communication and for some reason Java cannot establish a connection to our server as can be seen here:

https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=devcouch.de

Now I’m not quite shure if changing the certificate will solve the problem - but we’ll try.