I have been getting reports from listeners saying they have been able to download my show in the Zune MarketPlace, but it absolutely refused to synchronize the media it had just downloaded to their Zune media player.
I fired off a message to Rob at Zune to find out what the story was. The responding answer completely blew me away. This is the first negative thing I am going to say about the Zune MarketPlace. In fact I told Rob he needed to smack the Engineers that did this, because it is obvious that the engineering team did not read the RSS specification.
Here is the deal. If you have a RSS feed with only Audio or Video Enclosures you are fine. But mix Video and Audio Enclosures together in the same RSS feed and the Zune Marketplace looses its mind! The software makes a decision on which media type is going to be allowed to be synchronized to the Zune Player.
In my case, when I started putting up the CES Videos, the Zune Marketplace made some internal decision that my feed was now a Video only feed even though Audio was being intermixed in the feed as allowed by the specification.
Thus now my main podcast feed www.geeknewscentral.com/podcast.xml on the Zune Market Place will only Synchronize Video to Zune Players. It will download the Audio Podcast, but it will not Synchronize Audio to the Player, only the Videos. So what I have had to do, is create two new feeds to accommodate the engineers stupidity at Zune..
This just creates a huge mess! I have worked hard for 3 years to have a single feed be the existence of my podcast media distribution, and now I have to have three feeds. One for existing users of iTunes and other podcathers and two feeds to deal with the Zune Market Place BUG! IDIOTS
So word of Warning, if you mix Audio and Video enclosures in your RSS feed at this time, the Zune MarketPlace will likely default your feed to Video, and your Audio progra,,omh will be ignored and no longer able to be synchronized to the listeners Zune Player. So please be aware of this and inform your listenership.
For those using the Zune MarketPlace here is the new Subscription links for Geek News Central Audio Only and Video Only feed.
While Rob could not provide me a date on when this is going to be fixed we will have to live with the bug for now. When the bug is fixed we will have to work to migrate people back to a single feed.
One thing is clear the engineers on this project did not read the RSS specification or they would have known that multiple media types could be enclosed on a single feed.
Really how stupid could they have been on this. This is RSS 101 that any programmer should have caught not to mention the design team.
Since I had existing media from your show, I subscribed by entering the RSS URL. I currently have the most recent audio show and one of the CES video programs on my Zune. It seems to be working fine although I’m noticing some behavior in the downloading behavior of the Zune software that I’m not too thrilled with. I’ll let you know if I notice the dual-sync not working.
In my 3 years of downloading and listening podcasts via iTunes and iPods (multiple) I’ve never had a single problem. But this is a Zune and Microsoft so what do you expect?
I work in IT and my circle of friends is quite technologically savvy and I know no one who owns a Zune anyway. Microsoft has a lot of catching up to do.
Mario
Oddly I had no problems, I got them all! But when I tried to get the tech podcast roundup from last week, it said the site refused my connection.
Thanks for all your hard work!
Mark