I noticed one of my podcasts shows no new episodes since August 2. Their website lists a few since, and if I open their RSS feed manually I can see that there are new episodes in the RSS.
I tried adding their current RSS feed in case the URL changed, but I got the error “Something went wrong. Make sure the URL is correct and try again.”
It looks like Plex is unable to parse something about their feed, so it’s not noticing new episodes anymore.
I might be wrong about this. Networking is not my expertise. If I enter that address into my browser, I see a strange unformatted text page for a second then it gets refreshed and brings up the formatted rss page.
Oh, that’s really interesting! (I mean to me, in the nerdy way )
Very briefly, based on a few different things I suspect the feed was trying to behave like itunes for compatibility, but at some point itunes tweaked how it works and the feed didn’t change to match it. It could be that Plex is ignoring the feed updates because it’s not strictly acting like itunes for the reasons this validator is complaining.
I couldn’t see anything in my Plex server logs saying why it wasn’t accepting the new feed. If it said there was a validation error, that would identify this problem.
Last night, BTW, I tried a different validator that wasn’t as harsh. I don’t know if Plex engineers have a whitelist of feeds it shouldn’t be so strict with, but that’s often a solution to this kind of thing.
If I knew for sure it was a feed failing validation I’d be happy to shoot the owners of the feed a message about it. Is there any way you could check with other Plex folk to confirm that the feed is being rejected for this reason?
The validator I used failed because the source it got is not a proper normal RSS feed. It might be fine for iTunes, I have no idea. The formatted version I get after the page refreshes does look right. My guess is that Plex is seeing the first formatted version only and not waiting for the refresh to get the second proper RSS feed.
The refresh you’re seeing is purely due to your web browser trying a few different ways to render the page to the screen.
If you download the page directly through the command line, through wget on Linux for example, it saves with no problems. It’s just not a document intended for human consumption, so the web browsers try a few different things to figure out what to do with it. That wouldn’t be a problem for Plex, though, where it’s computer talking to computer.
The document is formatted with XML, and in these forums other people report problems with XML documents that don’t have the .xml extension. That might be happening here too, since this is an XML document without the .xml, but my money’s still on the validation issues from w3c’s validator.
Thanks for your work, though, and I’m happy to help with this any way I can.
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