Notices

Originally Posted by onion_cfe

This did cross my mind yesterday also. I'd definitely try such a service for convenience, but it'd be a bit of a shame to create a single point of failure in something that's otherwise fairly distributed. Syncing with another linux box doesn't really achieve what i'd like as you suspected, since my whole goal is that the tablet does everything. I am playing with the desktop version too though to get a feel for it's speed. Even that sat on the 850 item feed for a few minutes, so I think a lot of this is harsh reality on the imperfections of RSS rather than differences in processing speeds, of course not discounting that entirely.

I definitely like the look and feel of the application. Ironically when I first tried to use it in verbose mode I missed off the maemo flag and launched it with the normal interface and thought it fitted quite well. If there's one thing I dislike about maemo it's the single menu interface which tends to translate to 3 clicks to do anything, though I suppose some of the changes do lend themselves to extra space for the actual content etc.

- As above, I think i'd like the application a lot with a web aided service, although I wish there was another way. I wonder if maybe a compromise might be a small RPC style service to take a feed, order and/or shorten it, then return it to the application which could process it more quickly, now being able to make some assumptions. Then of course, the fall back to the service being unavailable could be the original method, so it would continue to work. That might not be as lightning fast as having a remote server do all the work, but it might create less of a dependency. The alternative seems to be something updating feeds on server, on a schedule, similar to Google Reader. I'd imagine that would be fastest, but be a huge dependency and be more complicated to code.

- The database stuff (displaying episode lists) has a little lag too although I suspect you've got that as tight as you're going to get it in an interpreted language. That's perfectly bearable and doesn't seem much slower on the larger stored feeds. No slower than Video Center's similar functionality.

- The parsing speed on a morning where only 3 feeds had changed was quite bearable. It's when a lot of people push out content at the same time the time gets harder to take. 5-15 minutes seems to be the range for my now 19 feeds, although this gets done in the hazy first 30 minutes after having woken up so I may be distorting time in my mind

- This morning I let it launch into 5 downloads at once. The interface didn't move again until three of the files had fully downloaded, then I saw the final two progress together. I will try configuring it to do 2 at a time tomorrow as I've only just noticed it's an option. It feels more like the downloads are maxing the processor out rather than the connection. Does it/can it yield at all during downloads?

- I am having trouble adding a feed. It failed to add from the OPML (the only one as far as I can see) and now it won't let me add it from the interface. It seems fine in the desktop version. The only thing I can think of is that the domain has a hyphen - it's http://www.manager-tools.com/feed. No other URLs in my list contain a hyphen.

- A startup page might be preferable to the top feed in the list being fully displayed. From what I can see this would give the user access to the interface a little more quickly. When in verbose it looked like most of the startup time is spent loading that feed. After a few days I realise i'm barely noticing this delay. Video Center by comparison takes ages to start up, although it didn't in older versions.

- Another thing I like about Video Center is the little list of recent downloads. Again, from a speed point of view, if there was a way to list the four files I'd just downloaded in one view and hit play, it would feel faster than having to display the feed to get to the downloaded episode. Do they need to disappear from the Downloads window as soon as they're downloaded?

Originally Posted by danramos

I have 14 feeds (would be 15, but I can't add one of them in the 0.13.0-maemo1 I have installed.. sigh)

and if I have to download more than 10 podcasts after an update, the tablet completely slugs along.. and will almost definitely reboot all by itself (probably thinking that there has been a crash); guaranteed to happen if I have 12 or more podcasts to download.

Playlists! There are none. I can't just highlight a bunch of podcasts, even in the same show--if I'm trying to catch up on a show, and then just tell it to play them all. It seems sort of annoying to dangerous to pay so much attention to gpodder while driving. (Some of my podcasts are short, like the hourly CNN podcasts, which last about 5 minutes each... it would be nice to queue up the last 6 podcasts from that feed to listen for my drive to work.)

When you save podcasts, you get asked where to save them.. one.. by one. Each and every one of the podcasts you highlight produces a dialog which asks for the path. It would be better to ask the first time and save them all there, if you've highlighted a bunch. It doesn't even at least REMEMBER the last path you selected so you have to repeatedly navigate to a folder you're trying to save to. This has been my only other workaround to queuing up a bunch of podcasts for a trip, since I can't set up a playlist in gpodder (see peeve #2, above).

I expect this stuff can be dealt with.. but I haven't had the time to work on a lot of things lately (barely even get to visit ITT anymore lately, work on my podcast again, etc.) much less take time to help out.. so I can't really 'scratch my own itch' to fix this and take the time to learn Python and participate--which would ultimately be the best solution for all involved, I think.

In the meantime, I'd hobbled along looking forward to each new release and hoping I can throw some donations at it, at least, when I can spare some money again. I think it's an excellent app for the N800 but I'd rather not see it depend on a web site to offload processing... a little too 'cloud computing' for me. I would prefer to avoid that.. and it would seem to defeat the whole purpose of RSS anyway.

Originally Posted by namtastic

A little off topic, but is there a special flag to use with Panucci to make sure it resumes? I've had maybe 50% success with podcasts actually resuming in the player vs. starting at the beginning, and I haven't found anything definitive on how Panucci should be configured in gPodder's settings.

Originally Posted by jcharpak

I know gpodder has an opml import. Is there anyway to import feeds from Nokia's video center. I could retrieve the rss URL's one by one but that's tedious.