[1.14.6] Podcasts play fine, but downloads corrupt files

Our site where this is occurring:

doheny.org/podcast

Unfortunately, I’m having the same issue on my site since upgrading to 1.14.6.

https://uturnpodcast.com

FYI: the issue can be temporarily resolved by removing the @ssp_readfile_chunked() or part of line 957 of the file class-ssp-frontend.php, leaving it to read header( 'Location: ' . $file ); You may run into a file size limit by doing this, but, if your download links aren’t working now, it probably doesn’t matter much.

The developer will need to implement a more permanent fix, however.

Thanks for the tip! We decided to just stream the episode until the downloads start working again.

What hosting platform are you on, if I may ask? I’m on WPEngine. Want to see if it’s related to the provider.

I’m running my own VPS at Digital Ocean.

Messing around with stuff further produced some different, inconsistent results, so now I’m not even sure if I was right about the original cause of the problem. Something does seem to have broken as of 1.14.6, though.

Thanks for confirming, I didn’t think it was related to our hosting provider.

Hopefully the dev is aware of the issue. Let me know if you need any info from my end.

Thanks for all the input here and sorry for the delay, but this has now been fixed in the latest release (v1.14.7) that will be available in your dashboards within the next hour.

The fixes in this release sort out the file URLs and file loading once and for all, so this kind of issue should not be able to rear its head again.

Thanks for your patience!

Thanks, Hugh!

Hi Hugh!

Thank you for the fix, unfortunately we’re still experiencing the same issue at doheny.org/podcast. Downloads a file of 0 bytes in size.

@scytus: I just checked your site and the URL for your latest episode’s audio file is https://www.doheny.org/podcast-download/2605/mission-to-mongolia.mp3 – that plays 100% correctly for me.

If it is still not working for you then it will most likely because of caching on your computer and/or server.

Cheers,
Hugh

The media file plays fine when you play it on the web player, or input the url directly in your browser.

But when you click “Download” it downloads a file 0 bytes in size. This would be a caching issue on my end?

Hmm – I just tested that again now with forcing it to download and I also get a 0 byte file. This doesn’t happen on any other server, however. That leads me to believe that it is an issue on the your side, most likely with your server cache.

Have a read through this document and see if any of those solutions work for you.

Hello, Hugh! I too am still having problems with zero-byte downloads of the podcast files. They play just fine in the embedded player, only the downloads are corrupted. I am running 1.14.8 of your plugin, and am running version .9.4.1 of W3TC. I’ve added the two URLS you listed in your toubleshooting doco, but the downloads are still trashed.

I am a WordPress novice and not really up on Linux. However, I can edit files. Is there ANYTHING I can do, with these podcast downloads? I’ve got a a lot of them and it’s frustrating not to be able to download them.

Thank you soooo much for any assistance.

Hi Hugh,

Thank you for being responsive, it’s been lovely to have such a supportive author. I did check with my hosting provider (WPEngine) and through days of troubleshooting they determined it shouldn’t have been anything on their end.

If it helps any, we’re also running Seriously Simple Stats, and our issue, to our knowledge at least (if significant or not) started after version 1.14.5 or 1.14.6

This appears to be happening to me too. 0-byte files when you try to download them. Seems to happen in Edge/Chrome but not in Firefox. I think it’s browser related.

https://www.avpgalaxy.net/feed/podcast