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Why don’t podcasts use VBR MP3s? Because iOS and macOS don’t accurately seek them

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Re: Why don’t podcasts use VBR MP3s? Because iOS and macOS don’t accurately seek them

#61

Post by MBCook »

archagon wrote: post #28
mwfunk wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like he got into it because it piqued his interest so he did a deep dive on the subject. Nothing wrong with that. I will get frustrated with people sometimes for not doing things that they ought to be doing, but I would never sh*t on someone for following their bliss and spending their hobby time on things I personally am not interested in. If this pisses you off then I can't imagine what sort of vitriol yo…

When your solution to an incredibly minor and easily-solvable problem is to ask people to bug Apple engineers about adding new features to a decade-old encoder, maybe you're on the wrong track. I'm frustrated by Marco's extreme fussiness, not his curiosity. (And there's no doubt his curiosity often leads to interesting places. I learned some great tidbits about MP3 encoding in the last few episodes!)

> When your solution to an incredibly minor and easily-solvable problem

What solution is that which he didn't mention? He mentioned AAC, custom formats, just do it and ignore the share link issues (LOVE the share links).

Re: Why don’t podcasts use VBR MP3s? Because iOS and macOS don’t accurately seek them

#62

Post by MBCook »

Analemma_ wrote: post #58
eamsen wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're correct about that there are different degrees of seeking support. Seeking VBR MP3 with perfect accuracy is trivial by forward-reading. However, this is obviously highly inefficient on long duration seeks. For instant seeking support, you need to (partly) depend on the optional VBR headers. This comes with its own set of issues, e.g., the most commonly used Xing header contains only 100 seek table entries, whi…

> However, this is obviously highly inefficient on long duration seeks. Is it that bad? On the podcast, Marco claimed that seeking forward through an MP3 to find the correct time is pretty efficient, and that the reason for all this trouble is that streaming (specifically, requesting the correct byte offset from the server, if you want to jump to a specific time on the stream) is the problem he's trying to tackle her…

He did say it wasn't an issue for downloaded files.

For streaming I believe he said you only get eight bits, which over a two hour podcast is about 30 seconds of precision. Then of course the podcast sometimes goes longer, not to mention how long Gruber's podcast goes.

Sounds like Matco is right it would work well for a 3 minute song but not s multi-hour podcast.

Re: Why don’t podcasts use VBR MP3s? Because iOS and macOS don’t accurately seek them

#63

Post by MBCook »

mwfunk wrote: post #37
zymhan wrote: post #6

So is this why I have weird problems fast-forwarding through some NPR podcasts? I'll find myself at the end of the podcast (as indicated by the time bar), but the podcast itself is still playing. Man, Apple really is neglecting podcasts. Reminds of an article I read recently - "Podcasts Surge, but Producers Fear Apple Isn’t Listening" http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/08/business/media/podcasts-su...

That article is a little misleading- it's actually about podcasters who want them to embrace/extend podcasting itself so that they (the podcasters, not the company) could better monetize podcasts. I can't imagine that the ways in which this might be done (DRM/subscriptions/user tracking/etc.) would appeal to HN readers, even if it would help the most popular podcasters make more money. IMO, benign neglect is the best…

What are you talking about? Marco's been trying to avoid that, as opposed to what the Stitchers of the world are doing.

Re: Why don’t podcasts use VBR MP3s? Because iOS and macOS don’t accurately seek them

#64

Post by billforsternz »

archagon wrote: post #16
Analemma_ wrote: post #4

If you want more context to this, there's a lot more in the most recent ATP podcast (with timestamp link included in the article). Which kind of highlights a problem that I think is only going to grow over time - the general greatness of podcasts has one big black spot in that they're tough to share. I've seen so many discussions recently where there was awesome additional context or info in a recent podcast, but it…

I just don't understand why Marco has bitten so hard into this problem. It doesn't matter at all . Everybody skips the ATP theme song anyway, and VBR will only negligibly improve quality of the rest of the show ( as Marco himself has pointed out ). And it's not like the theme song sounds bad in its current state! I have never noticed any artifacts or flaws in the recording at all. This is almost literally only someth…

I think you are the one over-reacting really. Marco spent some serious effort investigating something interesting to him and discovered a hole in some important software infrastructure. We can argue about how important the hole is, but there's no doubt it's a hole and filling it in wouldn't inconvenience anybody.

Less seriously, why would you skip over the song? - it's a lovely little song and my only problem with it is that it's an earworm that I find myself internally singing all the time. "John didn't do any research .... da da da". Of course John always does some research anyway. Now if only John would occasionally concede a point or give the other two some credit, maybe just once, life would be perfect.

Re: Why don’t podcasts use VBR MP3s? Because iOS and macOS don’t accurately seek them

#65

Post by jim-greer »

derefr wrote: post #21
Analemma_ wrote: post #4

If you want more context to this, there's a lot more in the most recent ATP podcast (with timestamp link included in the article). Which kind of highlights a problem that I think is only going to grow over time - the general greatness of podcasts has one big black spot in that they're tough to share. I've seen so many discussions recently where there was awesome additional context or info in a recent podcast, but it…

> I don't have a great solution to this; some kind of automatic transcription maybe? This was the original goal of YouTube, as a project: automatic video transcription to enable better accessibility and indexibility for audio/video. It's theoretically in there, but it doesn't do well at all. I'm honestly surprised it doesn't do better, given the Google Voice dataset that's likely backing it.

Actually that was the original goal of Google Video, which never got much traction and was discontinued eventually.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Videos

Re: Why don’t podcasts use VBR MP3s? Because iOS and macOS don’t accurately seek them

#66

Post by will_hughes »

Apreche wrote: post #7

That's not the only reason. We have been podcasting for over 10 years, and early on we tried to use VBR MP3s because we are teach people who know about that sort of thing. As it turns out, not everyone is listening using a modern device. When we tried VBR a significant number of people could not listen because their MP3 playing hardware/software of choice did not support VBR files properly. They didn't realize this w…

> using a modern device

How are we defining modern here?

I'm pretty certain my Nomad Jukebox 3 supported VBRs fine, and that's coming up on 14 years old now.

Re: Why don’t podcasts use VBR MP3s? Because iOS and macOS don’t accurately seek them

#67

Post by pavel_lishin »

raverbashing wrote: post #11
Analemma_ wrote: post #4

If you want more context to this, there's a lot more in the most recent ATP podcast (with timestamp link included in the article). Which kind of highlights a problem that I think is only going to grow over time - the general greatness of podcasts has one big black spot in that they're tough to share. I've seen so many discussions recently where there was awesome additional context or info in a recent podcast, but it…

I like podcasts, but they're unnerving to me. It's too much time wasted to get to the point. And as opposed to music, I can't program properly when listening to them Not to mention a lot of podcasters act in a radio way (which make sense for radio), with repetitions, talking slowly, endless introductions, chit chat, etc

Some are better than others in those regards. Most of the ones I listen to, I listen to for entertainment - so I don't mind some meandering. And decent podcast apps will give you reasonable skip options - I will frequently skip intros and outros (I'm looking at you, 99% invisible; I have never cared what your boy has to say.)

Re: Why don’t podcasts use VBR MP3s? Because iOS and macOS don’t accurately seek them

#68

Post by archagon »

MBCook wrote: post #61
archagon wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When your solution to an incredibly minor and easily-solvable problem is to ask people to bug Apple engineers about adding new features to a decade-old encoder, maybe you're on the wrong track. I'm frustrated by Marco's extreme fussiness, not his curiosity. (And there's no doubt his curiosity often leads to interesting places. I learned some great tidbits about MP3 encoding in the last few episodes!)

> When your solution to an incredibly minor and easily-solvable problem What solution is that which he didn't mention? He mentioned AAC, custom formats, just do it and ignore the share link issues (LOVE the share links).

I'm referring to the article. I presume that if Apple ends up supporting MLLT ID3 tags natively based on Marco's request, he'll feel free to switch his podcast to VBR without guilt. (Even though this will cause problems for all his non-iOS11 listeners.)

Re: Why don’t podcasts use VBR MP3s? Because iOS and macOS don’t accurately seek them

#69

Post by archagon »

billforsternz wrote: post #64
archagon wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just don't understand why Marco has bitten so hard into this problem. It doesn't matter at all . Everybody skips the ATP theme song anyway, and VBR will only negligibly improve quality of the rest of the show ( as Marco himself has pointed out ). And it's not like the theme song sounds bad in its current state! I have never noticed any artifacts or flaws in the recording at all. This is almost literally only someth…

I think you are the one over-reacting really. Marco spent some serious effort investigating something interesting to him and discovered a hole in some important software infrastructure. We can argue about how important the hole is, but there's no doubt it's a hole and filling it in wouldn't inconvenience anybody. Less seriously, why would you skip over the song? - it's a lovely little song and my only problem with it…

I mean, we're almost at 200 episodes at this point! Kudos to Jonathan Mann for writing a song that seemingly never gets old, but at this point it just feel like I'm brainwashing myself into remembering a bunch of Twitter handles.
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