I finally found a way to extract the XML files from enhanced podcasts that handle chapters and links.

1. Open up the podcast file in Quicktime.app
2. Window > Show Movie Properties
3. Select the first ‘Text Track’ and ensure it is enabled.
4. File > Export
5. Select the ‘Text to QuickTime TeXML’ format

You should then have a lovely XML file. Just need to figure a way to parse the files to get the simple stuff out. Like when to display a link/when a chapter starts, and grab the link/chapter name.

Since Mac OS X Tiger 10.4, preference files for applications have been stored as binary property lists. This really reduces the file size for preferences, and makes application access a lot faster. However, if you ever want to read the file as XML, you’ll need to convert it.

plutil -convert xml1 path/to/preferences.plist

Now open the file and it’ll be in beautiful, human readable, XML.