Podcast can not be played on this iPhone

[Bodhi395]

Sometimes I've been getting random messages when I try to download certain podcasts through the itunes app on my iphone that say, "Podcast can not be played on this iPhone" And it will not download or stream the podcast.

My phone isn't jailbroken and all factory settings, so what is going on here?

Is it just a random error in the OS or itunes store? Or did the podcaster actually upload the podcast in the wrong format?

I can't imagine Apple even making it possible to upload in the wrong format though, given how controlling they are about the itunes store.

Anyone know what is going on?

 

[Airmark1]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_0_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/532.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.5 Mobile/8A306 Safari/6531.22.7)

Video or audio podcast?

 

[Bodhi395]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_0_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/532.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.5 Mobile/8A306 Safari/6531.22.7)

Video or audio podcast?

Audio podcast

 

[Daveoc64]

I can't imagine Apple even making it possible to upload in the wrong format though, given how controlling they are about the itunes store.

They don't control Podcasts in that way.

Do you have any examples of such a Podcast? We could check what the files are like.

 

[Bodhi395]

They don't control Podcasts in that way.

Do you have any examples of such a Podcast? We could check what the files are like.

I podcast I was trying to download was "Gear Viewpoint" and the episode was "Nikon v. Canon"

For some reason that specific episode of that podcast will not work on my iphone 4. Its happened before I know, but can't remember the exact podcasts.

 

[Daveoc64]

I can't play it either.

Same error.

They must be doing something to the file that means it can't be played on an iPhone.

 

[Daveoc64]

Just tried downloading it in iTunes on my computer. It downloaded VERY slowly - I wonder if the iPhone wont play something if it downloads too slowly.

It will quite happily sync the Podcast to my iPhone 4 and then play it though.

 

[BeyondtheTech]

I have the same issue. My 3GS can play the podcast from the iTunes Store app, but the 4 cannot.

Must be the way it was encoded.

I sent the details to Apple to see what the deal is.

 

[ste1164]

This has also happened to me with the scott mills podcast.

 

[davidredekop]

Potential solution for cannot be played on this iPhone

I decided to dig deep and find out the actual cause of the problem and found a solution - in short, if you have a proxy server or anti-virus protection that scans http traffic before it hits your iOS device, it may be the cause. I wrote about it in more detail on a blog article here:

http://www.nerdsonsite.com/blog/2010/12/27/cannot-be-played-on-this-iphone/

Hope it helps others - disabling security protection on podcasts did the trick for me.