gPodder feedback

Don’t give yourself too much of hard time. We are very thankful for the work you’ve done so far!

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I’ve asked this question a while back but never got a response.

I download podcasts over Wifi to listen to later when I have no WiFi. However I have very high mobile data usage at the times I listen to the podcasts which leads me to believe GPodder isn’t using the downloaded files but instead re downloading the podcast over mobile data while I listen to it.

I have experimented turning off mobile data and then the downloaded is used. I don’t expect to have to turn off mobile data every time I want to listen to a podcast. I need the data on for other functions.

How do I get GPodder to use the downloaded files all the time?

Hey Alan,

If you download an episode the local file should be used and there should not be additional data usage needed, if you can provide logs (on github or here) of the sessions during which you download a podcast on wifi and then play it cellular that might shed some light as to what is happening by you.

One indirect way to tell if the local file is used or if the podcast is being downloaded is to pay attention to how fast playback starts, a downloaded file starts playback practically instantaneously while there tends to be a delay for a file that is being downloaded, also “jumping around” to different times in the podcast is only instant with a local file.

From your comments in your second paragraph it would seem the downloaded version is being used. The podcast starts quickly and it is easy to jump forward.

I have used my mobile providers app to check data usage and the usage peaks are at the times I listen to podcasts while driving in my car.

How do I collect the logs in order to gain more information? I presume I need to use Terminal?

Logs are stored in ~/.cache/harbour-org.gpodder.sailfish/Logs/ based on some very quick tests with my phone I guess you would have to use the CLI to copy them because sailjail/sandboxing prevents the filebrowser or MTP to access that path, not a lot I can do about that at this stage sorry.

If this is always during driving could it be that you are using a navigation program that is downloading live data (eg. waze)? Or that your car is using your phone as a cellular modem?

I’m sorry it’s taken so long to reply.

This all started with a blow out in mobile data use. Since the main time I use mobile data is when I drive to/from work I concluded the blow out was due to something that was happening during the drive time. Like listening to podcasts on GPodder.

I downloaded NetHogs and SystemDataScope. With SystemDataScope I noticed there was regular data transfers every 15 minutes, both on WiFi and on mobile data. This lead me to think my mobile data consumption issue may not be related to something I was doing on my commute.

Using NetHogs I managed to find that Meecast was likely the culprit. I discovered Meecast was set to update every 15 minutes. I changed this to 4 hours. My data consumption issue has disappeared.

I don’t recall what I had set the update interval to when I installed Meecast but it hadn’t been changed since I installed Meescast. The data consumption issue is to be more recent. I cannot really explain why the data uasge should have changed like it did.

It certainly seems Gpodder isn’t the cause of my issues.

Interesting and very surprising, I would not think that a weather forecast application should cause a lot of traffic, although I guess you also never really defined what “a lot” is and 10k vs 0 can be a lot too.

Hi,
the OPML Export is not working for me. I would like to migrate my data to my C2, but for that i need the opml export from gpodder. When i try to export, it looks like everything works fine. However i get no visual feedback about the export, if it worked or not. No positive or negative feedback, same applies to the log message. I tried with only a filename (relative) and absolute. Nothing worked. Does this work for anybody else? It would be great from a usability perspective if the user would get some postive or negative feedback.
It would be great if somebody has a solution for my problem or a fix in gpodder (if necessary).
Thx,
Andreas

Hey Andreas,
This is due to the default application of sailjail to all applications.
You can for now work around it by using a full path to a location that is included in the default profiles.

For instance:
/home/defaultuser/Documents/export.opml

I have not tried it in a while but I suspect that ~/Documents/export.opml and ./Documents/exports.opml may also work.

As you may have seen I need to retest a recent observation but it seems that moving to proper profiles may be hampered by some OS level shenanigans.
HTH!

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Hi,
exporting with a relative path like “./Documents/export.opml” worked for me. Full path did not work. It would also be nice to prepopulate the input field with some working default, so the user only has to adapt the filename, if needed.

Since I had been hoping to migrate to a proper sailjail config I was pushing off doing that change, but since it is maybe more complicated than originally expected I will probably push a new version that stores in ~/Documents instead of ~.

FYI - I hope to finalize 4.17.4 today which just fixes the export issue if nothing comes up after I update my phone to SFOS5.

In the process I also discovered a bug in the export code that will affect some users that will not be fixed in this release - Unicode characters in podcast information can cause OPML export to fail · Issue #215 · gpodder/gpodder-sailfish · GitHub

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4.17.4 is on Github (source), OpenRepos and in the QA queue of harbour.

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already past the QA queue :wink:

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Fantastic update, now I as a normal user am able to find the Podcast export OML file.

It is a very practical feature now made more user friendly. Thank you.

A possible feature to add is search.

Some podcasts are in the 100’s of episodes and it would be nice if the gPodder DB offered aside the usual filters a true search option for keywords on titles to find that very specific episode, even a cross search for word of all podcasts locally indexed would be possible, right?

Since in gPodder the whole experience is database index dependent a search is more than welcome. As you previously explained despite downloaded episode names in the file Sailfish system are named irrelevant or random, having downloads named in a structured way would be too much hassle.

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