How do you use podcast-itunes...?

I have a Pi.

I have an iTunes podcast URL like https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/abc/123?mt=123&i=123

I have podcast-itunes installed.

How do I start playback on the command line? What form should the URL take?

mpc add ???

There is zero mention of the URI form in any of the documentation at https://github.com/tkem/mopidy-podcast-itunes or https://docs.mopidy.com/en/latest/ext/backends/

My best guess so far was to preface it with podcast+, which fails, with a message like Error retrieving ...: not well-formed (invalid token): line 59, column 5785.

iTunes URLs are not supported. You need the real URL of the RSS feed for this to work with Mopidy-Podcast with mpc add.

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All right. Thanks. It’s working.

I’m not sure the direct way to get the RSS URL but I found this tool http://itunes.so-nik.com/.

If you enter the iTunes store URL there, it spits out a Podcast URL, and Mopidy can play that.

Suggestions:

  • Mention somewhere in the documentation for podcast-itunes that it needs the RSS URLs.
  • Figure out whatever magic that tool does and use it to add support for iTunes URLs, which would make sense for podcast-itunes, since it’s goal is to add things on top of the podcast extension to also support iTunes smoothly.

mopidy-podcast-itunes is mainly intended for browsing/searching podcasts. It doesn’t use a special URI scheme (except for iTunes categories/genres) but uses feed URLs to interface with mopidy-podcast. Since most podcasts should give you a way of retrieving the feed URL through their home page, and there’s quite a few tools that manage to produce the feed URL from an iTunes store URL, I don’t think I’ll spend any time on this. Contributions are welcome, of course.

Fair enough. If I figure out how the URL extraction tools work, and want to add support for iTunes URLs, would it make more sense in mopidy-podcast (e.g. opaquely detect iTunes URLs and extract), or in mopidy-podcast-itunes (assume podcast+itunes schema is an iTunes URL)?

Definitely would belong in mopidy-podcast-itunes, if at all; mopidy-podcast is based on open protocols and (XML) data formats such as RSS, OPML or (maybe, some day) Atom.

Also (well, I did already spend some time on this, contrary to my statement above) at least one way to get the RSS feed from an iTunes URL seems to be extracting the id parameter and performing a lookup using Apple’s iTunes Search API: http://superuser.com/a/782413

mopidy-podcast-itunes is all about using the (proprietary) iTunes Search API, so this might fit right in.

BTW, the HTML source from http://itunes.so-nik.com/ contains a comment linking to its PHP source: http://snipplr.com/view/52465
My PHP is a little rusted, but to me it seems like this actually scans the iTunes HTML page for some “magic” text… I’d like to point out that such an implementation would probably not be accepted for inclusion in mopidy-podcast-itunes :wink: