My sojourn back into the wild frontier of Linux as a client machine has been mostly good, but one thing that frustrates me is the lack of support for iTunes podcasts. The phobos.apple.com/blah/blah/blah urls that everyone and their mother (including The Austin Stone Community Church, by way of me) provide aren’t supported by most clients. This is fine for many sites (like Stone’s) because they also provide the link to the raw rss feed.
The thing of it is that it’s not a terribly complicated task to actually get the rss feed from an Apple link. At first I thought they were running some tpe of weird binary format, but those first 2 bytes were that magical combination 1f8b, gzip! Ok, maybe i’m an idiot for not realizing that it was a gzip compressed stream to begin with, but whatever. One zcat later and I see that those phobos.apple links are just redirects to an edge-caching site using an “itms://” link that is supposed to only be understood by iTunes. Replace itms with http and you’ll get another gzipped stream that contains the iTunes formatted feed. But that just means it’s XML that’s already pretty darn close to what you want. I guess I ought to check out the code and see about writing a patch…
Update: The last thing you get isn’t the original rss feed, but rather some marching orders for iTunes that has all the data contained in the original feed, but luckily embedded in there is a link that has the original feed given to iTunes. So if for example Cornerstone Church in Simi Valley is lame and doesn’t post that their rss feed is at http://feeds.feedburner.com/CornerstonePodcasts and only gives you an iTunes link, you can figure that out.