Well, just in case anyone else runs into this problem, here's how I solved it.
The issue turned out not to be a podcast issue per se, but instead had to do with playing mp3's. I followed the advice in this thread to "transcode from mp3 to mp3" and now everything works.
That is weird in 4.7 he added a downscaling command so you shouldn't need to do that anymore. Oh well if it worked it worked. I have been having trouble with some podcasts playing so I wonder if that will fix it for me too.