Timestamp issue on various shows (1970-01-01)

[tekjunky]

I use the RSS feeds to download a bunch of shows automatically on my HTPC (running XBMC on Ubuntu) and I sort them in their own respective folders by date.

This has stopped working as a a valid sorting method, as they shows now all have 1970-01-01 as their time-stamp.

Shows affected (that I have noticed so far)
Tekzilla
Hak5
DiggReel
Appjudgment
Diggnation
iFanboy
Web Zeroes
HD Nation
TRS

I'm pretty sure this applies to all the shows on Revision3, but I can't be bothered to download all the ones I don't subscribe to, just for testing purposes.

I download a bunch of other shows from other RSS sources and save them in the same place as the Rev3 ones and since neither of them have this issue, I'm confident it's limited to Rev3

[rylab]

We have not been able to reproduce this problem. Can you PM me a link to one of the specific RSS feeds you've downloaded which contains this timestamp problem?

[tekjunky]

We have not been able to reproduce this problem. Can you PM me a link to one of the specific RSS feeds you've downloaded which contains this timestamp problem?
Sure, here are two I just re-tested, the rest of the feeds are propably affected the same way:

Issue started from episode 178
http://revision3.com/diggreel/feed/MP4-hd30

Issue started from episode 48
http://revision3.com/hdnation/feed/MP4-hd30

I tested if the issue is still there, by using peapod (automatic RSS downloader) and by opening the RSS feed in a browser, copying the direct file links and then downloading the files using wget

[rylab]

I think I may have misunderstood what you're looking at, because those RSS feeds still look perfectly correct to me.

By "timestamp" do you mean the publish date shown in the RSS feed itself, or the physical "date created" meta info in the actual MP4 files you download? If you're referring to the latter, that's not something we have control over nor should you be relying on it.

[tekjunky]

I think I may have misunderstood what you're looking at, because those RSS feeds still look perfectly correct to me.

By "timestamp" do you mean the publish date shown in the RSS feed itself, or the physical "date created" meta info in the actual MP4 files you download? If you're referring to the latter, that's not something we have control over nor should you be relying on it.

The actual mp4 files metadata. I have to ask, why wouldn't you have control over that? If not you, who else?

I'm guessing somewhere along the process, the files pass though a server that is not using NTP and has been reset to the beginning of Unix/posix time (00:00:00 UTC on 1 January 1970)

I guess I can work around it by sorting by file name instead. This does however cause the "delete all files older than 10 days" script I use to clean out old episodes, to stop working as the new files affected by this would appear as really old, which is hella lame :)

The script if anyone cares:
"find /home/xbmc/podcasts/ -mtime +10 -type f -exec rm "{}" \;"

[rylab]

Right, it's happening on the edge servers on BitGravity's CDN, which we don't have control over. The file's metadata is intact when we upload it, but when they push it out across their network is when it's trimmed, I would assume for technical and/or performance reasons they've determined are more important. I will put in a ticket, but don't get your hopes up :)

[tekjunky]

Right, it's happening on the edge servers on BitGravity's CDN, which we don't have control over. The file's metadata is intact when we upload it, but when they push it out across their network is when it's trimmed, I would assume for technical and/or performance reasons they've determined are more important. I will put in a ticket, but don't get your hopes up :)

Thanks for following up on the issue - weird that they wouldn't just leave the files as they are, that would cost nothing in regards to performance IMHO.

Thanks again ;)

[tekjunky]

Right, it's happening on the edge servers on BitGravity's CDN, which we don't have control over. The file's metadata is intact when we upload it, but when they push it out across their network is when it's trimmed, I would assume for technical and/or performance reasons they've determined are more important. I will put in a ticket, but don't get your hopes up :)

The issue seems to have been resolved, the last 4 shows I downloaded are back to normal:

DiggReel, ROFL, TekZilla and AppJudgment

Thanks for your help - seems they listened after all :)