Unable to add custom RSS feed to Pocket Casts

  • Unknown's avatar
    ajkesseldb469559f9 · Member ·

    I posted this a few days ago but it never appeared — trying again in case it got swallowed somehow.

    I have a tool that creates custom podcast RSS feeds for me. The feeds work fine in other players like Overcast, but I’m unable to get it to add to Pocket Casts. I see Pocket Casts hit my webserver, so it is retrieving the URL, but it never shows the episode. The RSS is fairly minimal/stripped down, but it does pass validation checks. Can anyone suggest why this isn’t working? Sample RSS file below:

    <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<rss xmlns:content="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:itunes="http://www.itunes.com/dtds/podcast-1.0.dtd" version="2.0">
  <channel>
    <atom:link href="[removed]" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml" />
    <link>[removed]</link>
    <title>Testing Feed</title>
    <language>en-us</language>
    <itunes:explicit>no</itunes:explicit>
    <itunes:image href="[removed]" />
    <itunes:category text="Technology" />
    <description><![CDATA[testing]]></description>
    <item>
       <title>Testing</title>
       <enclosure url="https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/chrt.fm/track/8DB4DB/pdst.fm/e/pfx.vpixl.com/6qj4J/nyt.simplecastaudio.com/3e43d072-f8a5-430f-bc8e-4c70aafdf3c7/episodes/b348acd5-4eaa-4934-930b-8fe5da7751bd/audio/128/default.mp3"  type="audio/mpeg"/>
    </item>
  </channel>
</rss>
  • staff-joey8 · Staff ·

    Hi there, @ajkesseldb469559f9!

    If you try submitting your feed via https://pocketcasts.com/submit/, you will get an error indicating what is the issue we’re facing when trying to parse the feed.

    Taking a quick look at the markup you shared, the ‘Publish Dates’ (<pubDate>) seem to be missing. Adding that should help.

  • Unknown's avatar
    ajkesseldb469559f9 · Member ·

    Thanks! That solved it for me. I needed to add <pubDate> also Pocket Casts rejects HTML entities that are not in numeric form, i.e.  &raquo; rather than :».

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