Why is the app randomly repeating certain sections of content while streaming an episode? (dynamically inserted ads)

[mitchdowney]

The app repeats sections of podcasts. A section of 15-40 seconds will repeat. Upon investigation it seems that Podverse downloads podcasts with different lengths than the same podcasts downloaded by Apple Podcasts, Overcast, etc. Podverse’s download is always longer. The No Agenda podcast does not repeat and does not vary in length from downloads in other players.

[mitchdowney]

This appears to only happen with podcasts that use dynamic ad insertion. Podcasts that use DAI can change the length of the episode media file at any time on you.

For example, you might be listening to a podcast that is 1 hour long, with a 30 second dynamically inserted advertisement, but suddenly the podcast's hosting server switches to a different version of the same episode that has 1 minute of dynamically inserted advertisements. That would result in the podcast "jumping" by 30 seconds to a different position.

If you download episodes instead of streaming them, then you should not run into the DAI random time jump bug, since your downloaded media file will not change. However, if you stream episodes with DAI, then the podcast's server may suddenly change the DAI for your stream, and cause playback to jump to an earlier or later position.

As far as I know, there is nothing podcast apps can do to prevent this, other than to disallow streaming, which is not something we want to do.

[dirtlawyer]

Thank you. This makes sense. Is DAI a relatively new thing? I've been on Podverse for close to a year I think and I don't recall my old podcast app doing this. But I'm looking at the podcasts that did this and they are not downloaded. I haven't really been paying attention to whether they're downloaded or streaming. I will watch for that now. Great app. Learned about it from No Agenda podcast.

[mitchdowney]

Thank you! DAI has been around for years now, but it depends on the podcast if they started using DAI or not...also not all DAI is done the same. Some DAI services may change the ads once a day, while others could do it every 30 minutes or based on any number of other variables.

If you no longer notice the issue after playing downloaded episodes, then the issue is almost definitely caused by DAI. If you notice the problem with downloaded episodes though, lmk as there may be a bug.