Antennapod: Podcast randomly restarts from beginning

[kreetrapper]

App version: 1.6.5 (from Google Play)

Android version: 6.0.1 (Fairphone OS 18.04.1)

Device model: Fairphone 2

Sometimes when I'm listening to a podcast the playback jumps back to the beginning of the episode and restarts playing from there. The behaviour reminds me a bit of #345, which I also experienced when I still was using the option "restart playing when headphones get plugged in".

So far I have unfortunately not been able to reliably reproduce this, but it has happened about 5 times to me in the last couple of weeks. I will monitor it more closely now and update this ticket with additional information that I might be able to gather.

This random restart happened to me both when playing the podcast from the speaker and when playing on bluetooth headphones. I think (but am not completely sure) that this only happened with very long episodes (>2h) so far.

[mfietz]

Do you play a downloaded episode or stream?
Have you enabled sonic media player?

[kreetrapper]

I only play downloaded episodes.
Yes, I have enabled sonic media player.

[ghost]

Another issue that can be solved by moving to Exoplayer. I've seen this jumping playback as well.

[kreetrapper]

It seems that this is happening more frequently for me within the last weeks. I also discovered a related issue where a podcast that I paused somewhere in the middle, restarts from the beginning when I press play.

[pille]

i see this behavior with native player. seeking is not possible. maybe similar to #1573.

[ghost]

@kreetrapper These issues show up more and more as more podcasts show up using VBR encoding to save space and download time. Sonic has issues with VBR files and Native is just buggy in general to the point where your podcast will restart for no reason.

Luckily, Antennapod is adding Exoplayer support, but it will still be optional. I think it should just be made the default and only playback solution immediately to stop all these playback issues once and for all since Exoplayer has professional developers behind it that have solved pretty much all of their playback issues on a multitude of devices.

[kreetrapper]

@Riotous

Luckily, Antennapod is adding Exoplayer support

That sounds promising. Can you tell me when this feature is supposed to be released? I'd happily try it out while it's still optional and provide feedback.

[ghost]

@kreetrapper It is already available on the current beta and will be released when it goes stable.

[RaoulChartreuse]

I had the exact same issue with long podcast.
The typical usage was 1 hours of listening in the morning the at the end of the afternoon the podcast restart from the beginning while the time mark at the middle of the podcast.
I occurred only with http://feeds.feedburner.com/CaptureMagPodcast.
Here is the info of one buggy file and it is a VBR encoding :

laurent@Gros-pc:~/gPodder/Downloads/CaptureMag$ mp3info -x Capturemag_Episode_23_P1.mp3
Capturemag_Episode_23_P1.mp3 does not have an ID3 1.x tag.
File: Capturemag_Episode_23_P1.mp3
Media Type: MPEG 1.0 Layer III
Audio: 192 kbps, 44 kHz (joint stereo)
Emphasis: none
CRC: No
Copyright: No
Original: Yes
Padding: No
Length: 193:04
`

[pille]

i can confirm, that this did not happen again, since i switched to exoplayer

[ghost]

@pille it should be made the default. Antennapod has been losing users to playback issues for too long.

[keunes]

@Riotous, developer's response here: https://github.com/AntennaPod/AntennaPod/pull/2655#issuecomment-440448262

Before making it the default player, we need to fix the player settings menu first: Downmixing and independent L/R volume control do not work. After that, I prefer to wait some time to find out if anyone has issues with the player before changing the default.

[kn0wmad]

I've also experienced restarts and buggy playback, but notice it only occurs in a handful of podcasts and that skipping forward/backward or pausing/resuming will trigger the bugs. I have moved to ExoPlayer, but the issue seems to remain

[kreetrapper]

I can confirm that this no longer happens after I have switched to ExoPlayer. I notice a short "hiccup" in the playback sometimes and I assume that these are the cases where the old player restarted, but the new setup simply continues on.

[ghost]

@kreetrapper It's going to be great when all the old code gets stripped out and Exoplayer is the only backend and they just update Exoplayer for every new release. Right now it looks like they are transitioning to a 2.0 version which I hope brings Antennapod to the next level.

[kreetrapper]

Right now it looks like they are transitioning to a 2.0 version which I hope brings Antennapod to the next level.

That sounds interesting, @Riotous. How do you know about that? Is there a place where I can track the development? It seems the github milestones are not being used much anymore.

[ghost]

@kreetrapper That's just my opinion, not a fact. They've been making great strides towards making Antennapod a more reliable and modern client, More than in the past, that's for sure. I just hope they update the player screen to something more ergonomic and modern as well.

[ByteHamster]

Based on the comments, this seems to be resolved.