Here are the results of the survey, conducted in early March 2008. Thanks to all who gave valuable feedback. We might do something like this in the future again, but then we probably do it a bit more structured =) Announcement

How often do you check for new episodes?

  • once a week (2 users)
  • twice a week (3 users)
  • four times a week (one user)
  • daily (5 users)
  • twice a day (one user)
  • ~ all the time (2 users)

Manually or automatic feed update?

  • manual (6 users)
  • automatically: on start, 90min, 60min, 30min, 20min (7 users)

To how many channels are you currently subscribed to?

  • 4
  • 4 Audio and 1 Video channel
  • ~10
  • 12
  • 12 (audio only)
  • 16 channels.
  • 16
  • 18 (video). That's only my video podcasts.
  • 20 audio
  • 21
  • 21 (8 are audio the rest are video)
  • 23, all audio.
  • about 45. Mostly audio, a couple video, and a couple that feed both
  • about 47

Do you leave your episodes in gPodder or export them using "save as"?

  • Leave them (9 users)
  • Delete after/on sync (4 users)
  • Delete after listening in gPodder (one user)

Do you use the iPod/MP3 player or Bluetooth sync feature? With what?

  • USB MP3 Player (3 users)
  • iPod running Rockbox (one user)
  • iPod (3 users)

Other devices:

  • IAudio X5L (filesystem based mp3/ogg player)
  • iaudio M5 (filesystem based mp3 player)
  • Nokia USB mass storage device
  • Nokia phone (OggPlay) - I remove the SD card and sync to that
  • "Jens of Sweden", a file based mp3 player
  • Motorola A910 (via Bluetooth)
  • "I have a rio karma but not got it working on ubuntu yet"

Have you written custom scripts to fix gPodder annoyances?

  • Just something like "ls > playlist.m3u" (#25)
  • Script to create m3u files that I run after I sync to my mp3 player (#25)
  • gpodder-add.sh script to add feeds from Firefox (runs gpodder -a "$@") (#58)
  • Sometimes I have to use mp3splt on really long episodes (MP3 player-specific)
  • I used mp3splt inside gpodder to split large files, but I managed to get around the problem
  • I was thinking of making something to let it convert videos to dpg or dsv format, for playing on the nintendo DS and then transfering them
  • They keep getting fixed before I get to figuring out Python

Have you had problems with some feeds?

  • Just one, which had a password. I sorted it out in the end. (UI support for HTTP auth in place already)
  • Yes, I have several feeds that somehow don't work. I've contacted the administrators of the site with the problematic feeds but they never respond. (we cannot do anything about it, please keep sending mails to authors - in current SVN, we try to fix some issues with bad feeds)
  • Gad a problem with one feed. It just started working one day
  • Yep. Illogical tags, missing pubdate. It's really annoyig. (Please file a bug report when you find problematic feeds. Missing pubdate should be fixed in SVN by looking at the HTTP headers)
  • I sometimes had to delete feedcache.db when feeds didn't load properly (Should be fixed in SVN with the new dumbshelve module)
  • Yes, on a couple of occasions gpodder reports not being able to download several of the feed files other applications find the feed files okay. Deleting the feedcache.db file seems to work as a work around to fix this. (if this is related to shelve-related bugs, this should be fixed in SVN; if not, please file a bug in Bugzilla)
  • I have also had two occasions were gpodder reported zero length on files in a feed. This was just before gpodder started reporting it couldn't find that feed file. (If it's shelve-related, it's fixed in SVN with the new dumbshelve module; if it's because the feed has zero length data, we try to overcome this with HTTP head support in recent SVN revisions)

Feeds with URL mentioned (have a look into that):

  • http://feeds.theonion.com/theonion/radionews (sometimes cuts short on the iPod)
  • http://linux-foundation.org/weblogs/openvoices/?feed=podcast (length info is missing; fixed in SVN r605)

Are you using other podcast-related services that could be integrated into gPodder but currently aren't?

  • I create the playlist-file (m3u) for my mp3-player manuelly (#25)
  • Enhanced podcast support would be nice but impossible, considering that libgpod treats them as regular podcasts.
  • Sometimes I look on the website of the podcast or the channel, because there are some intresting links related to the podcast or there is a blog with comments on the podcast. It would be useful to open the site from the contextmenu. (A "go to website" button is available in the episode and channel dialog in recent SVN)
  • Only podcast alley for finding new podcasts to try. There are so many podcast directories I was surprised to see you talking about building a directory into gpodder. I would have thought it would be better to not reinvent the wheel and integrate an existing directory.

Have you been using gPodders ogg-to-mp3 conversion feature for iPods?

  • Didn't know this feature existed (2 users)
  • I don't need it/never seen ogg podcasts (4 users)
  • My player supports ogg (2 users)

Are you running the SVN version of gPodder or which released version?

  • SVN version (7 users)
  • old SVN version 2008-02-07 (one user)
  • Current release: 0.11.0 (4 users)
  • Current Fedora release: 0.10.4 (one user)
  • Not sure how to use SVN, using package from getdeb.net

One person was not sure how to use SVN. If you want to try it, here are the instructions: Running gPodder from SVN. I'm glad many people use SVN, as we are able to quickly fix bugs in SVN, where release versions (and distro updates) don't propagate so fast.

Comments and remarks

  • please let us define priority podcasts that should always be synced to MP3 and others that can only be downloaded. E.g. If I would add some public radios my 2GB MP3 gets easily filled up. Neverthelless, I'd like to keep track of these stations... (Tim Michelsen) (Please be more specific; also, file a bug report in Bugzilla)
  • The update file metadata feature is really cool, but for one of my podcasts it did not work very well. I believe the mp3 came with correct tag information, but the update file metadata feature overwrote the correct tag with blanks. You might consider not overwriting the fields if what you are going to write is a blank. (Matt Baker) (Please file a bug report with an example feed that doesn't work)
  • I tried throttling my download to 40kb/s and three at once to not choke my system. But then when I'm down to the last one or two, it would be nice if it could speed back up. Maybe this was recently fixed, so I hope I'm not putting my foot in my mouth. (Andy Busch) (Please try a recent SVN and submit a bug report in Bugzilla if it doesn't work)
  • Some podcasts I listen to are online classes, for these it would be nice if gPodder could download the oldest episodes first. (Brian Johnson) (currently this is on the no-features list, but feel free to send in a patch)
  • I have had to delete feedcache.db a few times due to corruption. (Brian Johnson) (fixed in recent SVN revisions with the dumbshelve module)
  • Unfortunately, the iPod touch is not entirely supported by libgpod, which causes my iPod to not handle play counts correctly. Another disadvantage of using the Touch on Linux is that the wireless sync is slow as hell. That's why I have decided to move back to iTunes. (Pieter De Decker) (Sadly, nothing we could do at the moment. Let's hope the gtkpod/libgpod guys fix it soon)
  • Overall I love gPodder it seems a have a few quirks which I am hoping will be fixed in forthcoming releases. Personally I would like to see it working solid with no issues rather than adding more functionality eg podcast directory. (Chris Newham)

Here are the comments for which bug reports exist/have been created:

  • Synchronizing should delete episodes from the iPod (Matt Baker) (#56)
  • it would be nice if syncing delete the deleted podcast episodes from the mp3-player (Bernd Schlapsi) (#56)
  • Downloading a lot of episodes at once takes a long time (Matt Baker) (#59)
  • I just queued up 100 episodes to download from a podcast. It took 2.5 min on my fast computer (Matt Baker) (#59)
  • Startup time. I was using a 1ghz computer and the startup time seemed really long. (Matt Baker) (#59)
  • An item above all podcasts for unwatched stuff would be nice or anything similar so you can get to all your unwatched stuff fast without having to look at the small numbers after the names. (Stefan Lohmaier) (#60)
  • Also, this is more of a gtkpod issue, but I use the extended database in gtkpod, so it has to check the SHA hashes of my files after I sync with gPodder. This eats up a good bit of time. I could disable it, but it would be nice if there was a way to make the two apps trust each other. (Andy Busch) (#61)
  • Sometimes I start a second instance when I forget that I have gPodder minimized to the tray - it would be nice to either not allow this, or pop-up the existing window. (Brian Johnson) (#62)
  • Generally, gPodder sometimes is a bit slow. More things like syncing with the mp3-player or updating the feeds should run in the background, so I can continue browsing through the feeds and marking podcasts for downloading and transfering to the mp3-player. (Florian Richter) (#59)

The raw file can be found here: survey-2008-03.txt

changed March 7, 2008