News Skill Issues

There seem to be a few things going on with the News Skill and this isn’t comprehensive.

  1. for many of the News selections, I get a message from Mycroft saying “…technical issue. I couldn’t start that news feed…” but it plays anyway. This occurred on NPR, BBC, PBS News Hour and AP Hourly News.

  2. Fox news gets the same “…technical issue…” as above, but the news never plays.
    The code looks reasonable:
    ‘FOX’: (‘Fox News’, ‘http://feeds.foxnewsradio.com/FoxNewsRadio’,
    image_path(‘FOX.png’)),

The log shows this:
File “/home/pi/mycroft-core/.venv/lib/python3.7/site-packages/requests/adapters.py”, line 516, in send
raise ConnectionError(e, request=request)
requests.exceptions.ConnectionError: HTTPSConnectionPool(host=‘foxnewsnetwork.mc.tritondigital.com’, port=443): Max retries exceeded with url: /OMNY_FOXNEWSRADIONEWSCAST_PODCAST_P/media/d/clips/4633a30a-0821-43b2-b233-aab201108451/23ee2b9d-080a-4e2b-8d54-aada012d111e/f3cb3556-d1f0-47e6-8e24-ac1c013b48c8/audio/direct/t1597864494/3PM_EDT_08_19_2020_Newscast.mp3?t=1597864494&in_playlist=b3bd4b0c-63b7-4140-ae0d-aada012d112c&utm_source=Podcast (Caused by NewConnectionError(’<urllib3.connection.VerifiedHTTPSConnection object at 0x44ac4290>: Failed to establish a new connection: [Errno -2] Name or service not known’))

  1. AP Hourly News plays news from (probably) early April. Code may be specifying an episode.
    ‘AP’: (‘AP Hourly Radio News’,
    https://www.spreaker.com/show/1401466/episodes/feed

  2. Georgia Public Radio doesn’t work at all. Message is “I’m not sure how to play news.” Looking at the code (and I am no Python expert), it looks to have no link to that, so perhaps it should be removed from the menu choices in the Skills settings.

"GBP": ("Georgia Public Radio", gbp, None),

I didn’t check any of the other feeds.

Are you still experiencing this, there was an issue previously but it was resolved 5 days ago

Item Number 1 is no longer an issue.

Items 2 - 4 are still NOT working properly. (Although #2 doesn’t have the “…technical issue …” message.)

thanks for the update. Will test those out and see if I can find the issue(s).

I’ve verified 3 and 4 and can see what’s wrong there, the feed pages has stopped updating and Georgia gets 404 errors when resolving the links in the feed. Alternative methods for finding the episodes needs to be added.

The fox feed looks ok at first glance, but I haven’t done any serious experimentation yet…Will look into finding alternative feeds for the AP and Georgia Public Radio stations.

Thanks for reporting!

Oops. I must apologize for reporting #2. It turns out it is not playing due to a router app that blocks some sites (malware and ads). Once one of the domains needed was whitelisted, the news began playing.

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