As podcasts are extremely popular and it’s hard to keep up with all the good content vs. the time of the day I was thinking of a feature that is yet missing in Nextcloud and might be a really good feature: A podcast player that syncs the current position of an episode with other devices/apps.
Maybe it’s easiest with an example:
My personal smartphone [1] is my main podcast listening device - I use AntennaPod on Android.
I have a work phone is an iPhone [2] to which I also sometimes connect my headphones, but then I can’t listen to podcasts between the calls as it’s quite a mess to disconnect and reconnect these Bluetooth things.
My work PC is a workstation tower [3] with Windows and at home I have both Linux and Windows on my personal laptop [4] plus an old tablet that I use occasionally to watch/listen to content [5]
That’s 5 devices and I’m sure there are more people out there with a similar if not bigger setup. When I stop on one device I’d like to continue on another at the same minute or at least keep the playlist up to date.
I don’t want to connect myself to a externally hosted podcast-sync service that keeps track of every minute I’m listening to something and analyzes my daily patterns or interests to sell my profile to some ad-service. My Nextcloud is hosted at home like a lot of yours. Ideally it could take over that job and additionally provide a service to listen through a webplayer.
I’m not sure if it’s a good idea to implement it in the existing music app as music and podcasts are quite different, but I’d be happy to hear your opinions.
What do you think? Could a self-hosted Nextcloud be the place to do that? I would of cause need some kind of sync-service in other podcast apps to make it work, but maybe there is already some open source solution (gpodder.net?) that could be self-hosted and implemented?
Would be great to hear your view and experience on that!
That would also be a very desirable thing for me (I use Android (AntennaPod), Linux, MacOS, Windows (gPodder)).
Basically, I think the service from gpodder.net is very good, but I would be happy to have the data in my own cloud.
In addition, their server is not reliable recently.
To start the year with bad news: to call gpodder.net “unreliable” would be a great understatement!
Their web page has been showing “bad gateway” and giving synching errors for weeks now. Even when it was working, synching has been very poor and has often failed, forcing me to manually sync my devices by exporting and importing the OPML file every few days.
So I would really embrace the idea if someone wrote an addon for NC, that would allow to synchronize an app like AntennaPod across several devices. I would even be willing to pay a few Euros for it, because I am really annoyed by all the trouble gpodder gave me.
Speaking about AntennaPod: this app is now capable of playing local files! You can tell AP to use a specific folder on your device and play the contained files! Of course, this folder can be synchronized by Nextcloud, so you can easily exchange local files between different devices.
Maybe this option in AntennaPod can be the base for a synching addon for Nextcloud?
Hello, I have been trying GpodderSync (thanks for the apps!) I always have 404 error when try to login on my server. Is there a specific path to define in AntennaPod ?
