S60 Open to new features

Hello,

One of the advanced feature I would like to see in the next releases is a podcast (audio & video) recorder to allow people to podcast thru their S60 devices and to upload them using the Wlan connection.

1. Podcasting should automatically deletes old podcasts. As i subscribe to quite a number of podcasts my memory card fills up quite quickly, esp if i forget to delete then once i have listened to them.

2. Downloading: I am not sure how it prioritizes downloading, whether it does it one at a time or as many as possible at one, but this is one area where it might be possible to make a huge battery saving. Especially, when the connection doesn't get closed (something i have heard others mention as well)

3. A way to startup the application at the time specified for downloading new podcasts, as i run out of memory or have to restart quite often, and the podcasts don't get downloaded in the morning.

Thanks again for the great app, its made the daily comute a lot more interesting.

René

1) Auto-downloading in the background (without having to start the app) would be nice indeed.

2) I already mentioned that users should be able to get detailled information about what went wrong when the red exclamation mark appears.

3) There is a "Preview" feature already in Podcasting which lets you listen to a podcast while it's being downloaded. Nice but when previewing, it should keep playing as long as there's data available. In other words:
- you're downloading a 20 minutes long podcast
- after the first 30 seconds have been downloaded, you start previewing
- problem: the preview stops at 30 seconds even though while you were previewing more data has been downloaded in the background. The preview should keep playing until it reaches the end of the file. This would be great when downloading podcast on fast connections such as wifi as it would effectively allow us to listen to podcasts in a streaming fashion rather than having to wait until the entire file has been downloaded before starting to play it.

4) When a podacst is being played in Music Player or RealPlayer, i'd like to be able to go back to the main Podcasting window to browse for new podacsts and start new downloads while listening. At the moment, you can either listen to a podcast or use the podcasting application but not both at the same time. Clicking "Back" when a podcast is being played stops playback. (of course, you can always open the podcast file manually in Music Player but this kind of defeats the point of having such a nice podcasting application).

5) I'm sure that you've heard that CorePlayer is coming very soon to symbian. In theory, it should be able to play wmv, mp4 and quicktime video files which means that pretty much all video podcasts are going to be watchable on our phones (at the moment, RealPlayer is only able to play 3gp files and maybe a few mp4 files). Supposing that CorePlayer really works, will Podcasting launch it automatically for files that it supports? (since CorePlayer is not even out, i suppose that we'll have to wait for it first anyway and then see).

6) Overall, i find the UI of Podcasting really good. I'm sure that it wasn't an easy task to pack a full featured podcasting application is such a tiny screen. There are a few things that could be improved though:

6.1) When subscribing to a podcating, Podcasting says "Subscribed", then nothing. It just sits there. Logically, after having subscibed to a podcast, i'd like to browse its episodes and start downloading a few. But to do that, i've got to go back all the way up to the main menu, then go to my podcasts list and look for my newly subscribed podcast. There must be a way to make it easier to browse a newly subscribed podcast.

6.2) It'd be nice to be able to create folders in the subscribed podcasts list. With just 20 subscribed podcasts, the list is already a mess.

6.3) In the subscribed podcast list, the number of episodes for each podcast is displayed as well as the date of the last update. But there isn't any indication that a particular podcast has episodes that have been downloaded but not listened to yet. I think that there should a big icon in front of the name of the podcasts that have newly downloaded episodes.
Typically I would start downloading 3 or 4 episodes from different podcasts then leave it there for a few minutes and come back later to listen to my new episodes. But since there is no indication of which podcasts contain un-listened to episodes (and i don't always remember which podcast i was downloading), it means that i have to open each and every podcast to see if there are no newly downloaded episodes in it.

6.4) In the podcast episode list, the icons indicating whether the episode has not yet been downloaded, has been downloaded but not listened to... are all almost identical. They're all microphones with slight color variations and maybe wee arrows etc. I never know what a particular icon means. I think that you'd need to find more explicit icons that are clearly different from one another so that one knows immediately what they mean and can have an immediate overview of which episodes have been downloaded, listened to...

That's it for today. Looking forward for the next version. Good luck :-)

Hi. Great app. Truly great. I am using it over flatrate 3G/2G.

1) This is probably a bug, but sometimes download just stops and the UI shows as if the episode would have been downloaded completely - I start listening, only to find that 4 seconds to 15 minutes have been downloaded. The system should be more resilient against losses of network coverage, etc. and continue download automatically if problems occurred.

2) Playing an episode is resumed after a phone call ends, but not after a calendar alarm.

3) "Play all new" option, where play would start with the next downloaded episode which hasn't yet been listened to

4) Online update checker, so that we would automagically get updates to app.

This may be a platform limitation but:

The application should keep track of where you were within a given track, when you exit the application during the playback. This feature would then be used to automatically take you to that spot and continue playback from there as you start listening the same podcast again.

Currently, as far as I know, there is no practical way of getting back where you were, if you (accidentally) happen to quit the playback 5mins before the end of 30min podcast :(. This on E61 S60 3.0 platform.

Remember playback position

Just one request, but a big one: Please let the app remember at which position of the podcast I left the app. Listening to Podcasts longer than 30 minutes or may require a break of several hours. In iTunes it is the option "remember playback position".

Hello.

I love the app but a few things.

Please let me reduce font sizes and rename the podcast within the client. I'd like short names like "Inside Europe" or "Living Planet" rather than RNW this and DW that.

A lot of other good points but everyone is missing my biggest gripe. When I use other catchers I can "clean" any show. I can remove all the episodes so I see nothing until the feed updates. I hope I'm being clear. I dont want to see a list of every episode released. If I've listened to all the episodes of a shows I dont want to see them in the list anymore. I want to be able to prune that list. Currently I can clean up a list of shows but soon as I restart the application I see the entire feed again.

Thanks.

I can elaborate if anything is unclear.

I have a fairly long list of subscribed podcasts now, some I only download the occasional episode from, others I want all episodes. AFAIK currently the auto update and download feature gets all subscribed new episodes. I would love to have the option to individually set which podcasts auto download, so I could get my essentials automatically and then manually select the rest at my leisure. Renaming and organising podcasts into folders would also be great. Thanks for the app!

Oh and one more thing:
To be able to display the time instead of filesize once the file has been downloaded, then i know if i can squeze the podcast in before i get to my destination.

Exclude podcasts in regular player

Is it possible to exclude podcats inthe regular music library? It's a bit cluttered with so many podcats floating on my flashdisk.

Great comments, folks. We are reading all the comments and taking notes. If you agree with a previously posted comment, feel free to add a "me too".

RE: Is it possible to exclude podcats inthe regular music library? It's a bit cluttered with so many podcats floating on my flashdisk.

Unfortunately, the current version of the music player cannot separate the podcasts from the music tracks since all music tracks will show up.

The NSeries music player (N91, N91 8GB, N95, N73 black range, and I think in the N75) should allow you to sort by genre which should list all podcasts downloaded from Nokia Podcasting under the genre PODCAST.

That doesnt help clean up your music view, though.

The separation of Podcasts from Music Files is something we are currently working on, though.

My GPRS connection is not stable, and sometimes download stops with red mark. After manual start download for stoped podcast - downloading process continue.

I think automatic download relaunching (with attempt limit) will be very usefull feature.

(tested on E50)

Podcasting application defaults saving to memory card. If memory card is not installed, downloading of podcasts does not work and application does not give anything else than red exclamation mark.

Luckily I had some firt-adapters-magic so I was able to figure out to change memory store to phone.

Another one:

This was reported earlier, but I find it most annoying: There's no way to listen podcast and download new ones at background - this is an issue that has to be fixed.

I would like to see folders to sort my podcasts aswell.

Thanks,

Gregory Palmén

(tested on E50)

Podcasting application defaults saving to memory card. If memory card is not installed, downloading of podcasts does not work and application does not give anything else than red exclamation mark.

Luckily I had some firt-adapters-magic so I was able to figure out to change memory store to phone.

Another one:

This was reported earlier, but I find it most annoying: There's no way to listen podcast and download new ones at background - this is an issue that has to be fixed.

I would like to see folders to sort my podcasts aswell.

Thanks,

Gregory Palmén

I have to put organizing in the first place.
1.Folders and renaming would be great.
Also i would like to see forehand what extension does the podcast i choose have.So I don't subscribe to a video podcast which plays only .mov or .m4v.
2.Podcast directory extension view.
Some podcasts don't have a very descriptive(?) title so if the podcast directory owner does have a text based larger description it would be great to see what that specific podcast it's all about.
3.Podcast description.
I hate when i subscribe to a podcast and i see afterwards that it wasn't updated in a year or so. It would be nice to see the last update date before I subscribe.
4.Last update in podcast directory.

That's about it for now. Ohh and I subscribe to some of the above requests: To be able to work with Podcasting while listening to a podcast on a media player and to be able to choose what program Podcasting will launch to listen/view. That would be nice to have for all applications.

Sorry for my English and good luck with this wonderful application.

I agree with a lot of the earlier comments, especially organizational issues. Not only would it be nice to be able to categorize my subscribed podcasts into folders, it would also be useful if I could export my collection to an OPML file that I could share with friends.

I'd also like to be able to designate which podcasts auto update, leaving some for manual update only. On a related note, while I definitely expect to have a default auto update interval I'd also like to be able to define a custom auto update interval for some podcasts. After all, if I know that Podcast A updates once a week on Sundays but Podcast B updates every evening, why should the application waste time and battery power attempting to update A and B every night?

One really big thing, though, is that I'd like to be able to be able to update and download files if I have an open USB connection to a PC with a hardline connection. While I have a WLAN at home, many of my friends do not and it is really far to expensive to use other over-the-air options if you don't have a flat rate plan. So it would be really useful if you could just plug the phone into a PC that was already online and then co-opt the connection to download items.

My last issue is one with openning a connection - I absolutely HATE that, once a default access point is defined and you manually select an action that requires a connection, the application will only try to connect to the default, returning an error message if it is unable to do so. What it should do is try the default first and then, when it is unable to connect, it should notify the user and then restart the connection request as if it were in "Always Ask" mode. Currently, "Always Ask" will also return an error if it is unable to connect to the selected access point. It should also handle this more gracefully, notifying the user and then re-displaying the "Always Ask" view so that the user can try again or cancel out of the operation.

Thanks for listening

I have used the podcasting application for a while now and it's absolutely fantastic! I think a great feature would be the option of opening a feed entry's webpage in Opera Mobile instead of Nokia's default browser. Is this doable?

Hi,

I ran into a weird bug today. I added the CNET TV podcast (http://www.cnettv.com/9706-1_53-0.xml?keywords=Serials) recommended in the comments of another post here in my E61. I downloaded the last episode. The format of the episode as reported by Podcasting was "m4v" (MP4 video i suppose).

When i clicked on the episode to view it, Podcasting didn't launch RealPlayer. Instead it launched the Truphone wizard!

Truphone (http://www.truphone.com/) is a VoIP service for E-series phones. It comes with a wizard application which makes it easy to configure the service to work via any random wifi hotspot you may run into. Obvisouly, this wizard application has absolutely nothing to do with video playing. So why is it that Podcasting thinks it can play MP4 files?

Hi,
Video postcast with support for iPOD format would be great. From what I´ve read this codec is supported by OS with the N-Series but not with the E-Series. Would be nice to have it supported for the also. Popular link for german news channel with video podcast here: http://content.zdf.de/podcast/zdf_hjo/061009_hjo_hjopod_h.mp4?2006-10-10T07:13:18

Nokia Podcasting is on the right tracks to becoming the ultimate podcasting application. But it's still a bit rough around the edges and kind of high maintenance. My wishlist would include:
1. Volume control: I like to listen to podcasts in bed. I use nice ear-bud headphones by Shure. At night, in a quiet room the minimum volume setting seems very loud. Is there a way to have finer-grain volume control than the application currently allows? When you go below 10% volume the whole device mutes. I would like to listen at 1%.

2. I second Auto deletion support. The application should be able to auto-delete stuff when the memory card is getting full. I hate it when my overnight update failed because the card ran out of space. This feature should be optional. Perhaps there should be a way of marking individual podcasts to be kept forever (similar to the way that TiVo does it).

3. Sleep mode: Let the playback automatically shut off after a period.

4. Shuffle mode: Automatically play all of the new and un-listened podcasts.

5. Play once mode: Do not automatically loop back to the beginning of a podcast that has just been played.

I really appreciate this little app, however buggy or "1.0" it might be.

My top request would be to introduce some custom options for each subscription. As mentioned before by others: I really would like the option to flag individual subscribed podcast with "Always download new episodes". Simply because, for some subscriptions... you always download new episodes. It feels kind of low-tech to do this manually. Every PC-podcast program in the world has this function, but I can’t seem to find it in this app (or am I missing something?)

Also, the option to "Delete old podcasts automatically" for each subscription would keep me from sitting down regularly and search for stuff to delete.

The player should be able to remember where you stopped listening and continue playing from this spot the next time.

Bug: Sometimes I only get the first few seconds of a download but the app says the download is ok.

Regarding the wish for an option to exclude podcats in the regular music library: As podcasts are located in their own directory (at least on my N91) there should be a simple way to tell the player to forget all about the podcasts? I could always start using genre or playlists but that would introduce too much manual maintenance for this guy:) It’s all about getting the right information on the phone as automatic as possible.

"me too" for most of the comments. One thing I would add is that "resume download" could be made much more robust. There are three outcomes that I have encountered when a download was stopped (for whatever reason) and resumed:

1) resumes ok and playback as expected
2) plays for a while then segues into replaying a short segment of what was played earlier then continues playing the rest of the podcast
3) resume download just appends the whole podcast to what was already downloaded. IE if I download the first 5 mins and stop, then resume for 5 mins and stop, then resume and allow download to finish, the resulting file would play the first 5 mins of the podcast twice then plays the full podcast.

I know some webservers does not allow downloads to be resumed, in that case the podcasting app should overwrite the partial download.

As Vioccc said above:

"1) Auto-downloading in the background (without having to start the app) would be nice indeed."

Me too. This application is without a doubt a "game changer" for my N95, but the fact that I need to remember to start the app so I can get my podcasts makes it less-than-perfect... At the very least, add an option to "auto-start" the app when the phone boots up? Thanks!