Podcast CIQ app

It would be fantastic if there was a CIQ app specifically for podcast management and playback.

We could configure the podcasts we want over a web interface (import existing OPML) and then have the Fenix 5+ automatically sync over wifi and fetch new episodes and delete the played ones. You know, like WatchOS 5 announced it will do. I would easily pay $5-$10 for that CIQ app and would be reason enough to buy the Fenix 5+.

The way it stands though, the manual sync of podcasts, deletion etc over a USB connection is so 2000s, I cannot even begin thinking of going back to that process.

kalamarios over 7 years ago

I guess there is no interest or maybe I just need to build it myself :)

Former Member over 5 years ago

There's runcasts now, but another important thing missing is on device variable speed playback.

rconradharris over 5 years ago in reply to Former Member

Unfortunately the devices don't currently have speed control APIs available on-device. To implement variable speed playback Runcasts has to perform a transformation on the server and send the modified MP3 down to the watch.

Former Member over 5 years ago in reply to rconradharris

Yeah thats too bad rconradharris. Perhaps too much processing power or maybe lower priority feature?

rconradharris over 5 years ago in reply to Former Member

Could be both but if I had to guess it's probably more the lower priority feature aspect.

To implement it, though, they'd first have to solve some latent issues in their media decoding pipeline, especially around time-skew during playback. One of the reasons Runcasts can't implement podcast chapter support is because the timestamps given out by the media player APIs don't reflect where the MP3 actually is in playback. And the error compounds over time so for a long podcast the discrepancy could be 30min or more.

Former Member over 5 years ago in reply to rconradharris

Thanks for the insight. Playback position isn't a trivial problem since files can be CBR or VBR, sample rates, etc. The variable speed would just complicate that.