Why does Podverse parse RSS feeds and save them to its database, instead of relying entirely on an external directory, like Podcast Index?

[mitchdowney]

What is the benefit of loading feeds from your server? Sometimes it looks like you proxy things that could be very well downloaded from the original source

[mitchdowney]

Podverse loads feeds from our servers so we can save references to the podcasts and episodes, to be used with our features that rely on server hosted data, like clips, playlists, queue, and history, and to be able to sync that data across devices.

If every podcast RSS feed had a unique podcast:guid and item <guid> then perhaps we could rely on those IDs for our other features, but <podcast:guid> is (at this time) not used by most feeds, and <guid> have not been universally reliable, since those unique ids are provided by the podcaster (or their RSS host company) themselves.

That said, Podverse syncs with the Podcast Index directory, so any RSS feed that is in PI, should also appear in Podverse (updates are delayed to Podverse for new episodes by ~15 minutes).