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Author Topic: Audiobooks and Local Content On iOS - Podcast Feeds?  (Read 1799 times)

glynor

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Audiobooks and Local Content On iOS - Podcast Feeds?
« on: May 10, 2016, 04:31:18 pm »

I mentioned once in a previous thread that I've been using a lot of audiobook content lately on my iOS devices. My daughter has become Harry Potter obsessed, and we've been listening to the audiobooks in the car a lot, as one example.

It would take a TON of improvements to JRemote to make it a capable audiobook player. Many of these (like bookmarking support and 30-sec skip forward/back seek controls) would be useful for video playback too. But not all, and especially not the need to "collapse" audiobooks in separate files into a single "entity" inside MC, in order for Bookmarking to work as you'd expect for an audiobook.

Likewise, I have issues where occasionally I need to transfer files to the device itself for playback when the iOS device will be offline (airplanes, mostly, but I also live up in the Land Where Cellular Service is Not Always Available).

I've been thinking a lot about this, and I think I have a simple-to-add solution that could really expand functionality of MC without adding anything at all to JRemote.

If MC could serve database objects (Views, and especially Smartlists) as podcast-formatted RSS Feeds, I'd be able to do almost everything I regularly need to do with my regular podcatcher app.  MC already serves itself via HTTP, and reformatting the playlist output as a RSS probably wouldn't be too much crazy trouble. What I'd love is:

* a button in JRemote that would open any "list item" up as an RSS Feed. This would automatically launch my Podcatcher (which handles RSS URLs on my device) and offer to subscribe to the list.

* If not in JRemote, then I'd settle for one in MC's UI (and copypasta them using Dropbox or some nonsense)

That way, if I want to "copy" an Audiobook over to my phone, I'd just subscribe to the podcast feed served by MC in my podcatcher.
If I want to copy some videos over to the device for playback on the plane? Add them to the playlist and download them all in my podcatcher.

My podcatcher of choice already handles all the requisite skip-ahead-skip-back functionality and bookmarking I need. It would be, of course, better still to have this integrated into JRemote (then those bookmarks would sync back to MC itself as well), but I get that this may not be in the cards for anytime soon. Still, though, serving an RSS feed would get me 95% of the way there, and doesn't seem like it would require any kind of  major re-working to accomplish.

Thanks for considering.
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fitbrit

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Re: Audiobooks and Local Content On iOS - Podcast Feeds?
« Reply #1 on: May 10, 2016, 06:31:34 pm »

Agree with all of the above. I am listening to a lot of audiobooks lately too. It's a a bit of a pain to load up a 150 Mb file over wifi at home, before setting out, so that I do not use all my 4GB data plan on reloading the same file again and again over LTE. To at least have a bookmark function or a local storage option would be fantastic. Thanks for the suggestions, glynor.
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