Author Topic: mixed encoding  (Read 6308 times)

yathosho

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mixed encoding
« on: January 19, 2009, 01:03:16 pm »
i'm maintaining a website with podcast which requires german umlauts to be displayed correctly. as this is not working as desired, i assume that blubrry mixes up the encoding. while the feed for the podcast displays a correct "ä" in the browser, itunes displays  "auml;". this leads to the conclusion, that blubrry does not encode the content of itunes-specific tags in utf-8 (presumably it uses iso-8859-1). i cannot imagine that itunes is demanding any different than utf-8, but i'm not familiar with the exact standards - forgive me if i'm wrong.

copy&paste of relevant lines from my feed:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<description><![CDATA[äüö ß éèê €]]></description>
<itunes:subtitle>auml;uuml;ouml; szlig; eacute;egrave;ecirc; euro;</itunes:subtitle>

i'm also wondering about <itunes:image> tag, shouldn't this store the image that itunes displays for the general podcast (not per-episode)? do i need to submit my feed to apple to make use of this tag? the url in this tag is valid, but does not display. checking other podcasts, i noticed that there are huge differences in how the image is stored:

1. <itunes:link rel="image" type="video/jpeg" href="http://domain/to/image.jpg">Beats In Space</itunes:link>
2. <media:thumbnail url="http://domain/to/image.jpg" />
3. <itunes:image href="http://domain/to/image.jpg" />

the podcast from 1.) had another url to the image:

<media:thumbnail url="http://www.beatsinspace.net/temp/bispodcastlogo.jpg" />

hope you can help me/clear up the confusion!

angelo

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Re: mixed encoding
« Reply #1 on: January 19, 2009, 04:25:41 pm »
Answer to your first question, we're not purposely converting anything from UTF-8. We are aware there is a problem though. If you know of a developer willing to help us solve this translation issue, please have them email me, cio [at] rawvoice (dot) com.

Answer to your second question, the way Blubrry Powerpress stores the image is correct. Example from the specifications page linked above: <itunes:image href="http://example.com/podcasts/everything/AllAboutEverything.jpg" />

Here is a link to the iTunes specifications: http://www.apple.com/itunes/whatson/podcasts/specs.html

The other two examples are not mentioned in the iTunes spec. The <itunes:link> tag is not mentioned anywhere in the specifications, it may have been something that was in the original specifications but is no longer used.

The <media:thumbnail> is for a different namespace called media. Just a quick explanation, XML by default has no namespace. A namespace adds additional tags to the XML in the form of <namespace:tag ...>. iTunes developed their own namespace and the specifications for it are available here: http://www.apple.com/itunes/whatson/podcasts/specs.html. To learn more about this "media" name space, go to the top of the feed where you saw its use and find the <rss ...> tag. Inside the <rss> tag should be attributes in the form of name=value. If the xml feed is well formed, you should see an xmlns:media="http://somesite.com/path". For detailed specifications on the media namespace, simply copy the URL value and paste it into your browser address bar and hit enter. The information will be rather technical. Powerpress does not add a media namespace to your feeds, but it does add the itunes namespace,  xmlns:itunes="http://www.itunes.com/dtds/podcast-1.0.dtd". This is rather technical information. I would recommend contacting a programmer/web developer for further assistance if you do not understand this yourself.

Thanks,
Angelo