Binary package hint: rhythmbox
I have subscribed to a few radio podcasts in RB.
I have broadband so it's fast, and it used to work just fine, however, in the past couple of months, the quality of my internet connection (blame crappy ISP here!) has decreased significantly (takes ages to connect to a server, transfer speed is highly unstable, and sometimes plain stops, then resumes when it feels like it, a second later, or a minute... depends on the mood and server !).
This revealed a serious weakness/problem in RB: 99% of the time, RB fails to download the podcasts ! Most of the time it just says "Waiting", and sometimes it downloads 5% of the file then sits there forever and won't move an inch even if I let it run for 3 days.
Thing is, if I try to download these podcasts in a terminal, using the "wget" command, it works just fine, and in the worse case, it takes 3 minutes to grab an episode and that's it.
That's why I think the problem lies within RB...
I suspect that the problem might be that RB times out way too easily, and most importantly, when it does time out, it gives up for good, and won't insist.
So the solution is probably to do as wget likely does (from what I can see) : increase the time out greatly when connecting initially to the server. Say a 2 minute time out, not less.
Then once it starts downloading the file, and in the event that transfer speed drops to zero : DO NOT time out, and just patiently wait for transfer to resume.
Thank you for your bug. What version of Ubuntu do you use? Do you have an example of podcast where you got the problem already? Could you try to get a log of what is happening when it hangs with "rhythmbox -d"?