A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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But there’s a lot of podcasts, especially from sources like IHeartRadio, that have scads of annoying ads
And they're so repetitive. And each block is the same length if I'm not mistaken. This could even be automated - not relying on human input - or at least half-automated.
It should be doable to so some audio analysis of the episodes. They "always" (I am sure some forget every now and then), have an outro and intro around the ad block. With a clearly defined jingle per podcast. You should be able to make a program that analyses the audio and listens for that block and cuts it out for you.
I had found one that used Whisper to convert the podcast to text and then ran it through an AI to find the ad text, but I couldn't get it to work. I had considered building something myself and was about halfway through that when I found this method. It does the job better than I think an AI would considering it's crowdsourced for the ad identification.
This is exactly the route I've been begging for for years now. It seriously should be doable.
Yep. Certain patterns are easily recognizable even by machines. One could have a relatively simple "IHeartRadio algorithm" that should work 99% of the time (esp. with Ed Zitron who brackets the blocks with that insane guitar riff).
Hell, I could even write that with ffmpeg and a shell script.
OK I'm being arrogant now, but not wrong.
I've had a pipeline in mind for exactly this purpose that I want to build when I get around to it:
In theory, this should be able to remove ad and sponsor sections of any length completely automatically and there's nothing to stop it working on videos too
Seeing your VPN to Albania also works. Online advertising is banned there.
🤔 The vpn I currently use doesn't have an Albania mirror, but it may be time to switch!
This is what ive been doing for about a year and I love it.
Well, why the hell didn't you tell me? You owe me 10 minutes per episode back for the last year.
Honestly I'm surprised more people don't do it. Its so easy.
Honestly I’m surprised more people don’t do it. Its so easy.
I can't seem to get any podcast app to recognize the RSS feed. I've got audio only media downloaded and my Pinchflat server is publicly available but all the podcast apps I've tried say there is no media when I copy the RSS link from Pinchflat. Any suggestions?
Did you route the RSS endpoint outside of auth?
https://github.com/kieraneglin/pinchflat/wiki/Podcast-RSS-Feeds
Yes, I have that variable defined in my compose file.
Hmm. What podcast apps have you tried? I use antennapod and it just works
I’m on iOS and I’ve tried all the big ones: pocketcasts, overcast, Castro, Apple Podcasts. The only one I can get to work at all is Apple Podcasts if I give my local address and not my public address.
Are you sure that the domain name is set up correctly?
If local works but domain doesn't that seems like a place to look
I'll often get ads for the podcast I'm currently listening to. Like, I'm already here, what more do you want?
The thing that really annoys me is when they auto insert variable length ads cause it frequently messes up and if you stop and resume a lot it can end up messing up the playback.
As far as I've seen, if someone has submitted the sponsor block report, this works perfectly. Of course it depends on someone getting to it, so a very lightly listened to YT channel might not have anything submitted for Pinchflat to use.
I'm pretty adept with my ff/rw buttons, but I already have the docker machine to run this...
The thing that gets me about the ads on BTB is that (based on the ads I get) IHeart apparently thinks of it as a "true crime" podcast and... I guess I can see that, but I've got zero interest in listening to podcasts about some weird small town murder or whatever.
However, the Small Town Murder podcast is excellent.
It might be, just not my thing.
Thisis a great tip! Wanted to check out pincheflat anyway, great weekend project 😁
this sounds great. thanks for the tip!
I think I already have pinchflat. Didn't know sponsorblock worked for podcasts. Thanks!