Introducing the Episode Connection Tester!

It’s finally here! The Episode Connection Tester is a unique new feature that we have added to Podcast Guru app for Android that will help users run a self-diagnostic on playback issues they experience. When a network playback error occurs, the error notification will give you the option to test the episode by simply tapping on the error notification.

Before we get into the details, I’m going to be blunt here.

Except with very rare exceptions, playback issues are not usually the fault of the app.

You can be sitting at home with a strong wifi signal and still have playback issues if the podcast publisher is using a $2 a month server behind a faulty router. In addition to this, all the networking code, or the network stack, along with the radio/wifi drivers are baked into the Android OS. Therefore, they are not part of the app. Podcast Guru can make requests and read the data returned to it, but it can’t correct issues in the network stack or improve a poor connection.

Okay, with that out of the way, let’s get to the cool stuff. Usually, when someone reaches out to our tech support about a playback failure we run some diagnostics, even if we can’t fix it, just to be friendly and let users know what the problem is. 

We thought, why not just let users run these tests themselves, directly from their device! 

Here are the results you’ll see when you run an episode connection test, what the tests are doing, and what the results mean.

  • Media URL - This is the URL to the hosted content, which usually takes the form of an audio file, like an MP3. You can click on the URL and attempt to launch the content into a browser on your device. This is a form of testing. During the test, you might see this value change, which is normal. See the Trace Test for more details on why this happens!
  • Network Connection -This is a very simple test! It asks the underlying OS, “Do we have a data connection to the internet?”. If it fails, that’s a big problem when trying to stream or download content!
  • DNS Check -This does a very quick check to see if the hostname of the publisher’s server can be resolved to an IP address. It’s never a good sign if this test fails as it indicates that your network connection is not very strong at the moment.
  • Trace Test -It’s very common for the first request for audio content to be redirected to another place. This may even happen multiple times! The redirection may be the result of publishing servers attempting to load balance. Or, perhaps, the content has moved and you’re simply being redirected to the new location. After a trace test is performed, if there was a redirect you will see the Media URL field get updated. If the trace test fails, that’s a bad sign. It could mean your network connectivity is poor, or a misconfiguration of the publisher's server.
  • Ping Test -A ping test simply sends a tiny packet of data to the publishing server in a special format and hopes to get a response. It’s a very quick and lightweight test to check if the publisher's server is up and running. Not all servers will respond to a ping test. If our episode connection tester gets a response, it will tell you how many milliseconds it took, giving you a rough indicator of the speed of the network between your device and the publisher’s server.
  • Response Test -The response test checks to see if the media is actually there on the publisher's server. Most everyone who has used the internet has seen a 404 or “Page not found” error. This is a similar test. If Podcast Guru gets a 200 response, that means everything is okay! If not, there is definitely an issue with the publisher's server and the podcast publisher will have to correct the problem.
  • Speed Test -Finally, this does a quick and dirty speed test on the content itself. The test will try and stream the content for about 10 seconds and give you a rating on how fast the data came back to your device. The response is a good indicator of how much buffering the app might have to do before you hear any audio. If it’s fair or poor, you might have to deal with a lot of buffering and pausing while listening to the episode.

A final word on episode connection testing! Like we mentioned earlier in this post, Podcast Guru can’t fix any of these items if they fail. However, we do our best to provide tools to help you work around high latency connections. If you are experiencing high latency, buffering, or other playback issues, the best strategy is to use our automatic download features to try and keep an offline copy. We offer automatic downloads in our free tier and an Advanced Download Manager for our VIP subscribers. For more details on that, please see our FAQ.