Re: [Banshee-List] Why won't podcast notice already downloaded podcasts?

[Adam Tauno Williams <awilliam whitemice org>]

On Tue, 2015-07-28 at 07:15 -0700, gnomeuser gmail com wrote:
> tl;dr:
> There is no reliable way to do this. Podcasts rely on extremely frail 
> technology. Importing an existing Banshee database is your best bet.

+1

> Longer, more depressing:
> Each Show/Network publishes a feed (typically RSS) which lists the 
> episodes they currently have available.  .... The podcast feed does 
> have useful information that could be applied towards this task, e.g. 
> if there was a published checksum we could calculate that for files 
> found in the Podcast folder or specified by the user and match them 
> that way. After all checksum must be how we determine if the file was 
> downloaded correctly, right?

Technically I believe the Etag on the podcast blob [the MP3 file]
should be able to serve the purpose of change detection with a simple
HEAD request... but, of course, nobody implements this [server side]
correctly.  So there is no point in a client making the request.

> Bingo you are thinking, Banshee sucks for not doing this and you’d be 
> right.. was it not for the depressing state of Podcast feeds.

Yep.

-- 
Adam Tauno Williams <mailto:awilliam whitemice org> GPG D95ED383
Systems Administrator, Python Developer, LPI / NCLA