YouTube links causing feed to break

on adding the URL to my post content area I can view the video etc from the website,

That seems be a relative function of WP. With older versions it was necessary to use a plugin to have such a functionality.

If you do that then WP adds the usual <iframe> tag to the blog post and the W3C feed validator recommends to not to do that. But the feed should stay valid. Maybe the iTunes server has more strict rules. I don’t know.

But maybe there was something else wrong with this feed. But I would like to see this test feed which you mentioned in your post. I can’t say more without seeing this RSS feed. Could you post the URL to this feed?

This is the test feed I used…

https://www.muslimcentralmedia.com/feed/?post_type=islamic-lectures&speaker=test-speaker

Hmm … when I visit the web page of the test post I can’t see the YouTube video. Did play with the editor mode (you switch between the Visual and text view of the WP post editor)?

One thing you could try: You could insert the YouTube URL with podPress. podPress is capable of inserting YouTube videos. But that has one disadvantage: If you have more than one YouTube video per post then you can not choose an individual position for each video in the content of the post. Because you could use the podPress placeholder only one time per post. podPress would insert all videos at this place.

I see the youtube URL somehow became a LINK.

I fixed that but still iTunes not happy.

https://www.muslimcentralmedia.com/feed/?post_type=islamic-lectures&speaker=test-speaker

https://www.muslimcentralmedia.com/islamic-lectures/test/

Okay, now the page shows the YouTube Player.

But I wonder why the iTunes Server should have a problem with the XML code of the feed which contains this post. Usually it simply ignores posts (<item>s) without an <enclosure> (posts without a podcast file) like the test post.
Currently it seems that the <description tag of the test post does not contain the <iframe> tag. It seems to be almost empty: <description><![CDATA[]]></description>.
It would be great if you could leave this post as it is for the next 24h. This way we could see whether the <iframe> tag was the cause of the difficulties.

Updated the feed with a youtube video post, and it says
‘We had difficulty downloading episodes from your feed’

Does the iTunes page of your podcast contain the other posts while you get this message? If the epsiodes still appear in this situation then the message simply means that one of your posts in the feed does not contain a podcast episode – that is true. The test post does not contain an episode.
btw: A YouTube can not be an episode which some one could download with the iTunes client software. If you would add the Youtube URL with podPress then podPress would add an <enclosure> tag with a dummy URL to the post in the RSS feed. This way iTunes would display the post as an episode. But nothing more since there is no real episode file.

1. Does the iTunes page of your podcast contain the other posts while you get this message?

It just complains that it cannot download episodes

2. I will leave that url around np.

3. I did try create a feed using podpress to hold the youtube url but this also failed. I recreated it for you here..

https://www.muslimcentralmedia.com/feed/?post_type=islamic-lectures&speaker=test2

It just complains that it cannot download episodes

But does it show also the older episodes besides this message?

I did try create a feed using podpress to hold the youtube url but this also failed. I recreated it for you here..

I guess you have accidentally deactivate the function Included in: [ ] RSS (below the editor box in the podPress box where you add the URL) for this episode. Could you fix this for me?

1. No

2. Yes, I updated it but still gives an error with iTunes.

I then noticed it is NOT possible to save. If I click those RSS checkboxes, after saving it is unchecked!

I don’t know why the boxes are unchecked after saving the post. It should happen. I have worked today on this issue and I had to create a post and attach an YouTube Video with podPress. I changed these settings and saved modifications. But I could not observe this behaviour. But I will test tomorrow with a custom post type post.