Podfic Meta

Hey, so today the first of my 3 pod_together projects was posted.

On Accents and Podfic, written by me and read by anatsuno.

This was in response to the poll about accents posted to amplificathon at the end of last month. I had originally started writing different meta for anatsuno but when this conversation happened, it sort of ate my brain and this is what I was able to get out.

It was a little hard for me to sit on it this long, since I kept wanting to talk about what I was saying in it when the conversation was still happening, but hopefully people will still find it useful.

I highly suggest listening to the reading of the meta, because it all sounds so much more intelligent in anatsuno's voice (it's also amusing to hear her say that she's a Canadian who understands French accents fairly easily :P)

Streaming on AO3

I've been working with AO3 a lot lately, trying to get everything going for pod_together set. Namely, I needed to work with them with regards to streaming podfic on AO3.

Last year when I spoke to them about it, they added Google to their whitelist so we could use the Google Reader player to stream our podfics. Earlier this year though, Google started changing things around and the player basically stopped working. argentumlupine found a solution that involved uploading a copy of the player to other hosting and using that.

That's a problem on AO3 though, because they have to whitelist any sites hosting the player before it'll work over there. To get around that, they announced in their July 31, 2012 newsletter that they'd host their own copy of the player and gave out code that would eventually start working once they committed the code.

As the posting dates for pod_together drew nearer, I started to panic. When I contacted AO3 again, they said they were being held up by Legal, because they thought hosting their own player might be against Google's TOS so they didn't want to go through with that option and if they did it would be very temporary while they figured out another option.

I've been hosting the code for anyone to use on podfic.com. I said I'd be willing to take on the liability of hosting the player if they didn't want to and they agreed to whitelist my site so we could use it for pod_together (and so others can use it).

However, it looks like when they put my solution through, they also made the AO3 hosted solution work too. I saw some of my friends changing their streaming to the AO3 hosted solution, and worrying that they'd have to change things all over again later, I tried to warn people not to and today I emailed AO3 to find out what was going on.

I was told that, indeed, it was a mistake that the AO3 hosted solution was active and they've since deactivated it. So, if you fixed your streaming links using the AO3 hosted player, your streams are broken again. /o\

If you want to use my streaming code, it can be found here.