I really want podcast apps to hook into SponsorBlock.
Right now I’m listening to very few English podcasts because of all the advertisement. I switched to German and Swedish because most of them don’t have any advertisement in them.
Podcasts often dynamically generate ads at the point of download, making the SponsorBlock-approach unviable: since the media is expected to be variable-length you can’t store media positions that map to advertisement segments.
You could potentially match on audio, though – look for the 15 seconds of podcast audio preceding the ad, and the 15 seconds following it, if folks reported it in a sponsorblock way.
Alternatively, we could build a shazam-style database of 30 second podcast ads, then skip them when they’re identified. There isn’t much variety out there.
Ah interesting, that just shows that I have successfully avoided subscribing to those. The few ones with ads I listen to get the ads read by the hosts like in YouTube videos.
like others have pointed out, this makes automatic detection easier not harder if true. Just cut the segments that move around, audio analysis and even transcripts (they don’t have to be good! just good enough to identify missing segment!) are pretty mature.
I really want podcast apps to hook into SponsorBlock.
Right now I’m listening to very few English podcasts because of all the advertisement. I switched to German and Swedish because most of them don’t have any advertisement in them.
Podcasts often dynamically generate ads at the point of download, making the SponsorBlock-approach unviable: since the media is expected to be variable-length you can’t store media positions that map to advertisement segments.
You could potentially match on audio, though – look for the 15 seconds of podcast audio preceding the ad, and the 15 seconds following it, if folks reported it in a sponsorblock way.
Alternatively, we could build a shazam-style database of 30 second podcast ads, then skip them when they’re identified. There isn’t much variety out there.
Ah interesting, that just shows that I have successfully avoided subscribing to those. The few ones with ads I listen to get the ads read by the hosts like in YouTube videos.
Can confirm, at least for Acast distribution, I generally get no ads when I’m not in an English speaking country at the time of download.
However, iHeart podcasts are always absolutely crammed full of ads everywhere.
like others have pointed out, this makes automatic detection easier not harder if true. Just cut the segments that move around, audio analysis and even transcripts (they don’t have to be good! just good enough to identify missing segment!) are pretty mature.
I really just want a podcast app that replaces Pocket Casts (I use the free version).
What I look is a client that works with pretty much all the possible gadgets (even a damn Amazon Alexa) and have Sync between all of them).
Pocket Casts does this to me but the Alexa client is kinda broken (it never saves/sync the progress) and the PC client is behind the paywall.
Spotify is a close one for what I want… But I just don’t like it.
Can you share the German podcasts you enjoy?
Echo der Zeit, Datenschutz plaudereien, NZZ akzent (one little ad in the middle), Netzpodcast, SRF Input, News plus, Focus,
Some may be swiss german, tho.