gPodder feedback

So I actually had it but broke it when I tried to make error messages more descriptive and forgot that podcast doesn’t exist there.

Anyhow 4.17.2 was released last week on github and I finally submitted it to OpenRepos and harbour today…

4.17 series - “Achva”

“Achva” means fraternity, comradeship, brotherhood and/or sisterhood

Thanks to my sponsors on github (@peperjohnny and @schmittlauch), please consider also sponsoring me.

4.17.2

Full Changelog : 4.17.1…4.17.2

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Can the playback speed be displayed like “1.2” instead of something like “1.2000000476837158” ?

Also sometimes getting the crash issue when starting a new episode when playback speed is not 1. Doesn’t seem to happen when the playback speed is 1.

Great app though and I use it every day.

I have the same problems with crashing - not sure why this happens for some podcasts and not for others) - i can also the problem with the playback speed rendering. This happens for me as well.

What you describe was as far as I recall fixed a long time ago (rounding and limiting decimal places), are you running the latest version and if so what are your speed slider settings (min, max, increment size)?

As for the crashes they involve the media backend of SFOS to which I have no access or ability to debug, what I wrote when I added the feature (see note) still applies, it is buggy and finicky and I don’t have the tools to fix that.

If there is a SFOS guru who can show me how or send me a PR I will most definitely try to learn though.

We add playback rate control, please note that it is not the stablest of things but since this is also the case for other media applications that use it we’re still adding it.
Release 4.13.0 - "Osher" · gpodder/gpodder-sailfish · GitHub

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Thanks for your reply, understand about the media backend causing issues out of your control.
The speed slider is set to min 0.5, max 2, increment 0.1
I’m using version 4.17.2 from the Jolla store.

Does the non-rounded display happen to you often? On specific podcasts?

I was not able to recreate with a quick test using your settings on my side but that of course does not mean that it is not happening for you, software will be software.

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I was trying to look into that with a podcast I rarely listen to, and now I have another problem :slightly_frowning_face:
Yesterday I was looking at the settings and “Download location” was there but blank - not set to anything (I didn’t realise the location was supposed to appear on the setting screen. I had never touched this setting before so everything was at default)

Now that I’d tapped on it, I didn’t know what to do so chose “Home folder”, the file browser can’t see hidden directories and the default location is a hidden directory.

So I swiped left and it displays the download location as “/home/nemo”.
Everything still worked ok.

But just now gPodder crashed, and on restart none of my downloaded podcast episodes are visible, they’re still there on disk but gPodder can’t see them.

Oh wow, I never thought of the need for a “Reset to default”, I will try and get a version out that does that.

In the mean time what you can do to have gPodder ignore the setting is set a folder that you can’t write to as the downloads location (/root for instance), or if you are willing to do that you can edit ~/.config/harbour-org.gpodder.sailfish/Settings.json manually and reset the setting to an empty string.

Also based on your story it would seem that the initial button language should be different when the setting is still default, maybe “Change downloads directory”?

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Since I posted I looked around for the settings file and found it, I tried changing the line in Settings.json to “/home/nemo/.local/share/” - that got me the podcast icons back but not the downloaded episodes.
I’ll try your suggestion now…
… it worked! all downloaded episodes appearing and working as normal. Thanks!

Also I can now confirm that the decimal places issue occurs on all podcasts I’m subscribed to.

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Issues:
-downloads that get interrupted are no longer able to restart ->> streaming becomes only option, saving to SD impossible.
-filters take very long and often result in “not responding”
-overall Gpodder becomes very slow and unresponsive and gives a genuine N900 swap experience while I am on a monster 4GB RAM XA2 Ultra. This also with few other programs open.

Wish:

possibility to move items up & down in playback queue
default filter setting (for example “fresh”)
default to filter screen after refresh (instead of list of podcast)
relevant and structured naming of the downloaded files (how does Downcast on iOS handle this, is there some kind of Podcast “exif” system?)

Best wish list item recently added: choice of download directory (to SD), can’t thank enough for that easy feature.

Overall it is my favorite & most used frequently native program on Sailfish.
The polished Tailfish & Slumber duo come close but Gpodder sees more use.
Slumber sleep timer is an ideal companion to Gpodder.

Thanks

You can overcome the first issue by manually deleting the interrupted downloads (named *.part) in ~/.local/share/harbour-org.gpodder.sailfish/PODCAST_NAME/*.part

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Hi,
is is possible to add support for My Backup to gpodder? (see here: My Backup | OpenRepos.net — Community Repository System) - This way it would be much easier to migrate from one device to another (in my case C2). The downloaded data does not need to be migrated (at least for me). What needs to be backed up and restored:

  • podcasts
  • status of podcasts (listen progress)
  • settings

Since it is basically only a special configuration in the desktop file entry defining the interesting paths, it should be quite easy to implement.

Thanks in advance.

Very cool, do you know if it is possible to prompt the user what part should be backed up? ie. as you say you don’t care about downloaded others maybe do…

Although come to think of it I don’t know how I would handle alternate download locations, I guess a default setup would include it…

With My Backup you can configure custom backup directories - this way you could add the store locations as well. However i am not sure if it makes sense to backup gigs of mp3, but that are just my 2 cents.
Backing up the meta default should be no problem since, data should be always in the same directory. If the user wants the mp3 backed up as well, then he/she should add the other paths via My Backup explicitly. The backup process does not allow user interactions, as far as i know.
Cheers,
Andreas

By default the database that stores the state of gPodder exists in the directory in which all podcasts are also stored so unless you changed your downloads folder they would be included.

Also depending on how you use gPodder you may want to maintain what you downloaded since everything that is marked as downloaded and no longer found will be marked as deleted and not just as old.

Talking about gigabytes of backups of theMP3’s,
I’d like to transfer them of the Sailfish device for listening on other devices, for future historians.
Using OpenMTP on MacOS to get them from SD card on Sailfish to magnetic HD to DVD, to Cassette tape, to …
That’s a pretty easy method if it wasn’t for the file naming.

GPodder does not save the MP3 files in an orderly way: Podcast - Episode Title…, it rather looks like the raw file delivered by some external system. Format varies but is not decided & cleaned up by GPodder

The Podcast format seems to omit the uploaders / creators duty to pre configure this naming orderly (in contrary to what you see in digital imagery Exif or music with sensible naming of the files and internal IDTag)

The filenames are as far as I recall whatever the podcast creator chose to name them, so basically wild west.

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Podcast being big in 2024 it is very odd that naming of downloaded/uploaded podcast files has not been standardized.
I don’t understand why everything needs to have video (high res!) where it has no added benefit and on top of that be streaming based by default. Intentional volatility and energy consumption, why.

I have another question: I would like have an option to save exported OPML file to somewhere I can find it. I checked the DB / download directory as picked in the menu but it is not there. Thank you so much.

By default it is stored in ~ (for most up-to-date SFOS devices that would be /home/defaultuser)

I have an open ticket that sailjail may be interfering, since my install is very old I never noticed this, but I will probably be implementing both sailjail and the backup thing mentioned by Andy.

As for standardization -

Since there is no technical reason to standardize and all podcast clients don’t care what the podcast maker hands them there is no pressure to do anything, if anything the pressure is opposite, if I would do anything I am probably harming more users than I benefit (and putting myself in a crazy complicated mapping scenario where I have to map my renamed files to the RSS feed and deal with detecting a ton of edge cases because I am not doing what everyone is doing).

When I was a student I had a flatmate who was annoyed by this in the torrent naming schemes being different between different groups, he ended up writing his own program to standardize his downloaded filenames.

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