It is difficult to produce a television documentary that is both incisive and probing when every twelve minutes one is interrupted by twelve dancing rabbits singing about toilet paper.
R. Serling
Recently I quit using the Apple Podcast app — after finding out a way to export the episodes. But the reason wasn’t that I had exported the episodes, but that a few US American shows had German advertising spliced in.
If you don’t know ads in German, first, I am envious, second, yeah, they are that bad. Just imagine listening to a really stimulating conversations, and then you hear a cutting voice saying «We use the pause to …» followed by a completely unrelated ad. Which «pause», there was no «pause». That was in the middle of a conversation. If people would do the same in real life — some people talking about an interesting issue and someone else jumps in between them screaming about a new product … well, I don’t like violence, but if someone punches that guy in the face … I’d want it on video.
So, yeah. As for US American ads, given that they are usually read by the Podcaster/Vidcaster himself, they are annoying as fuck, but you know in advance when they come and that’s what the skip forward is for.
If you have the skip forward button. Unfortunately, when using the Apple Watch controls, players like vlc only seem to allow you to skip the «song» or «video». There is no skip 15 seconds forward button. Doesn’t make that much sense for usual videos. I had some other problems with, e.g., with GoodReader. Continuous audio playback was possible with the screen off, but not with video. Makes sense for the typical use case, but not when you want to listen (and only listen) to a video while the phone is in the pocket. I could convert downloaded videos of, e.g., The Rubin Report, to audio, but that’s an additional step I’ like to avoid.
However, BookPlayer seem to work well. Not Apple’s Audiobook Player (couldn’t get it to work with video downloads), but players like BookPlayer. It’s an open source project that asks for a tip (which they did get) and does the necessary things. Sure, it could be improved. A very easily reachable bookmark button would be nice, even better if it would export the last 30 seconds or so (30 seconds more with each additional press) as a sound file. But still, good enough for now.
Here’s hoping ads don’t creep in another way.
