Podcast support in M3
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@luetage
it's already possible
checked at https://www1.wdr.de/mediathek/podcast/index.html where you can click at any podcast (URL ends with .podcast)
the normal rss feed subscribing page opens and if you do so, it's listed in the feed section -
@derDay This website is an exception, they really did an awesome job. You can’t subscribe easily to normal podcasts yet. And even with your example feed, there’s no good native system to listen to it. When you open the feed and click on the player to stream, you basically can’t use other parts of M3 until the podcast is over. As soon as you click something else the audio stops and the player is reset, just like with a video in a feed.
But thanks, it just goes to show that we are pretty close already, which is to be expected since podcasts are built upon RSS feeds. Not sure they should end up in “Feeds” though, or whether there should be an additional category within M3 for it.
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@luetage
thanks for explanation. as you guess, I didn't hear podcasts often -
@derDay It wasn’t an explanation and I think I did very poorly. I don’t really know how it works, but I imagine it’s comparable. Almost every podcast needs a website, or some kind of hosting service, I guess few organizations/people load up their podcasts directly to iTunes/Apple or Google Podcasts. This website needs a podcast RSS feed so apps can pick up the content and this is where Vivaldi could pick up on the feeds too. That this already works in Vivaldi came as a surprise to me. Maybe they already have something planned. But we also should be able to pick up podcasts by using direct links that are meant for Apple or Google and this needs conversion to a feed I guess.
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Just to add to this, over the last couple of days I tried using M3 as a podcast player. We can in fact double click an article to open it in a standalone tab, which makes listening to a podcast, while also having the rest of M3 available, possible. The issue is the podcast stops playing and resets as soon as the theme is changed. I’m sure it’s a bug, but it just goes to show it’s not meant to be at the moment.
On another note, could a moderator please move this to the Feeds subforum? I wasn’t sure where it belonged at first, but I believe the similarities justify it. Cannot report my own post sadly. If someone reads this, please feel free to hit the three dot menu on the top post and report.
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Thanks for taking the time to discuss this point, it's nice to see some examples that test the limits of our feed support
A few things to note:
Podcast feeds are not just "like" RSS, they really are RSS or Atom. Vivaldi supports both, and it supports "enclosure" tags in RSS or "enclosure" links in Atom feeds. These are the types of link that point to podcasts. As long as they are set to have video/* or audio/* mimetypes, and the mimetypes are supported, then Vivaldi will try to play them inline.
Vivaldi supports MP3 playback within feed items, as long as Chromium and your system support MP3 playback on that system. This works on the computers I have tested on, but it is possible for it to fail on some. This is not something we can really control, since it is up to the system to support it. It should work on most modern systems.
Because it is played within a mail client, it is unfortunately not possible for it to keep playing when you display another mail/feed item in that tab, since the old item is no longer being displayed. It is not really possible to do this any other way, because it would need it to keep all previously displayed mail contents in memory forever, which would quickly cause it to grind to a halt.
You can double click on the mail list to open items in a new tab (as mentioned above), and then it can remain open and playing when you browse other content in your mail tab. Perhaps we can make this more discoverable (middle click works in some other clients) - I have filed a feature request for that
Unfortunately yes, changing the theme will cause all mail views to be redrawn, because changing a theme causes all UI to be redrawn, and mails/feeds are displayed within a piece of the mail UI. Since they take their default styling from the theme, this is something that is unlikely to change. Hopefully you're not changing your theme so often that it becomes a problem...
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@tarquin Thank you for clarifying that.
changing the theme will cause all mail views to be redrawn
This is only an issue when you have a theme schedule set. Since podcasts are typically relatively long, it’s bound to happen at some point. It’s not something users would expect and it would be nice to have a solution for this. Not sure what would help, maybe somehow detaching the player once it has been started, or automatically deactivating scheduled theme changes while a podcast is playing.
2 issues remain:
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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.
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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, or you can search for podcast websites directly, but Vivaldi doesn’t always show the RSS icon at top. I imagine this is because sometimes the feeds are outsourced. Currently I’m using the PlayerFM website to find the feed links, which works out well enough. It shows links to the podcasts website and to a corresponding feed, but this is often split between two different domains! Don’t know how to achieve it without the help of a third party site.
All of this is only needed should developers deem it worthwhile to fully support podcasts of course.
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@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/ -
@tarquin I had no idea testers have been using M3 as a podcast player. There was no talk about it on the forums. Rereading the introductory blog post, I came to realize podcasts are mentioned two times, which I didn’t notice initially. The fact audio and video are available didn’t strike me as unusual, since my previous feed reader could do it too, but it all makes sense now. And no, I didn’t know this is your project, so thank you for working on the implementation. I’ve been using both dedicated podcast apps and an extension in the past, but having this native in the browser makes far more sense. I’ve always favored the idea of a browser as an internet suite.
In the meantime I figured out how to retrieve complete and working feed links for almost any podcast, I’m gonna post about these observations later on.
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There is scarcity of working podcast players on windows.
Feeds in the sidebar seem to be separate from mail app now (maybe only visually and not technically, I don't know). Maybe in the same manner we could have podcasts separated from feeds. And it could have all conveniences of decent podplayers:
- search in major podcast libraries
- visual selection of podcasts and episodes (by podcast logo / episode image)
- continuity of playback in long episodes
- sync of subscriptions and playback positions across devices (afaik no software can do it on windows)
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