Now that I think about it, it would be really standup of Apple or someone to provide a webservice that would take an Apple iTunes Podcast link and do the translation to return the standard XML feed that drives that particular show. That way, people that implement various products that act on the feeds could the iTunes link and do the conversion themselves. It would certainly save me a lot of time from doing that process I related in the previous post. It really sucks, and I’d be happy to never do it again.
Update: Andrew Clarke has this working as a client side python script. It works!
I’ve just written a Python script to do this. As you’ll see from the comments, it’s a bit of a hack, but I’ve tested it with two different ITMS links and it seems to work alright.
http://blizzard.dnsalias.org/itunes-url-decoder.py
Regards
Andrew
Andrew, that ROCKS! Thank you for it. I obviously didn’t spend a lot of time trying to reverse engineer the ITMS protocol. Thank you for doing it.
Thanks. I probably spent an hour on it. About half the time I spent trying to figure out the structure of Apple’s XML. It’s all over the shop…
Dave, refresh that URL for a small bugfix to the script. 🙂
Thanks so much for this little script…. I’ve been searching for a way to listen to/subscribe to podcasts that people only publish on itunes. This is one of the last things that I have been wanting to sort out on my linux system!!! Once again.. Thanks so much!!!!
This is the tool I’ve been looking for, but I’m not sure how to use it. Should I be able to just d/l it and run it?
http://blizzard.dnsalias.org/itunes-url-decoder.py
this link is not working can you please send the decoder to my mail seshuprasad.v@gmail.com.