WIP - episode duration tag / attribute

[dellagustin]

Hello all,

It is very useful for podcasts listeners if the duration of episodes can be shown at podcast players.
The RSS enclosure tag has an attribute for length, which is the size of the enclosure in bytes, but it does not support duration for media files natively.

Since the namespace also support alternate enclosures that could have a different duration, these scenario should also be considered.

Existing Tags

<itunes:duration>

From A Podcaster’s Guide to RSS

The duration of an episode.

Different duration formats are accepted however it is recommended to convert the length of the episode into seconds.

References

• RSS 2.0 enclosure tag
• Alternate Enclosure tag
• A Podcaster’s Guide to RSS - at https://help.apple.com/
• RSS feed guidelines for Google Podcasts

[jamescridland]

What's the issue with <itunes:duration>?

[hoccau]

Hello here, and thanks for the work around Podcasting2.0 : it's amazing!
It was my understanding to that the podcast namespace could standardize the main features of podcasting experience and I didn't understand why there is not a podcast:duration (or something like that) in the namespace when I discovered it. If, for any reason, the itunes namespace is not wanted, I think it is missing an essential information in the podcast item.

[dellagustin]

Hello @jamescridland ,

What's the issue with <itunes:duration>?

Not much, my understanding is that the podcast namespace aimed also to consolidate features from other namespaces.

One think that I don't like with <itunes:duration> is its lack of format definition for the value:

Different duration formats are accepted...

Which formats? Empirically I know that hh:mm:ss is often used, but there is no clear definition. Personally it makes it easier for me as app developer if only the duration in seconds is accepted - although, I understand that the feed is also supposed to be as human readable as possible, and hh:mm:ss is human-friendlier.

Another aspect, as mentioned in the issue description:

Since the namespace also supports alternate enclosures that could have a different duration, these scenario should also be considered.

This is something where <itunes:duration> would not help, as it is only supposed to be used directly under the <item>.

[theDanielJLewis]

I really don't think we should limit ourselves based on making the RSS feed "human-readable." It's a coding style intended to be read by apps, not humans. And it's already rather unreadable simply because of the existence of tags.