@luetage said in Podcast support in M3:
This is only an issue when you have a theme schedule set.
Indeed. I am not sure if there is any way we can work around that, given how media is played only as a basic video element (without scripting support, since it's in an email view).
But I can certainly ask around to see if it might be possible to pause theme changes while playing media.
Podcasts can be presented as series and have a pretty long episode list, but M3 typically only loads the last couple of dozens of feeds (like most feed readers). For podcasts we would need access to all items.
This is up to the owner of the website. The website chooses how many items to put into a feed. Vivaldi does not impose any limits.
As a client, it can only work with the information the website gives it. The client can keep the items forever afterwards (and Vivaldi does), so if the website owner removes items from a feed that Vivaldi has already seen, those items remain in your local client. But you will need to have been subscribed to that feed while the items were in it. It cannot know about items that historically used to be in a feed (a server-side crawler like a search engine could perhaps keep older records, but this is a client side implementation).
Finding a feed link is not an easy task. From Google Podcasts or Apple Podcasts you can most likely find a link to a podcast website
Indeed. The icon in the address field normally uses these standard links that websites can choose to include. But for some reason, some website owners fail to add links to feeds to allow auto-discovery. BBC news is one such example - they have feeds but no dedicated links to them on relevant pages of the site.
You can search for their feeds with a search engine, and once you have the URL, either add it in the Vivaldi settings or load the URL, it will show a preview and let you subscribe. Server side discovery is not really possible since it would need the browser to send the server details of your browsing in order to fetch a list of known feeds on that site.
We do, however, add special workarounds for popular websites like YouTube (implementation is currently a work in progress). If you know of a major podcasts website that offers feed URLs but fails to show the icon, let us know, and we might add a workaround for that website if it looks possible.
You will find with some sites (like the one you mentioned) that they intentionally do not link to the feeds that they offer because they want to push traffic to their own subscription service; they do not want you to use an external podcast player, because it means you do not need to visit their service.
All of this is only needed should developers deem it worthwhile to fully support podcasts of course.
(In case you didn't know, you're talking to me right now - it's primarily my project, with a few of us involved in linking it into the mail client.)
Yes, podcasts are a cool thing, and we definitely put in some effort to make sure they worked. Some of our testers make substantial use of podcasts, so we got a fair bit of testing done to ensure it could do more than a basic feed reader. Playing videos and audio inside a mail view is not normal, and it's something we specifically added to make podcasts possible.
In the end though, it is really a feed reader with podcast support, rather than an infinite podcast aggregator. It will have limitations in that respect; it cannot keep records of podcasts that have already fallen off the end of a feed before you subscribe, and it cannot link to podcasts that are delivered in some other format rather than being part of a feed.
That doesn't make it perfect though, and your feedback is really valuable. There's always room for improvement. If you find issues where something breaks that should have worked, please make sure you file it in our bug tracking system so that the developers can hear about it
https://vivaldi.com/bugreport/
