Antennapod: Album Art from Zencast-hosted podcasts does not "stick" and has to re-download once in a while

[Pentaphon]

This is on a Moto G6 running 8.1 using Antennapod 1.8.1

1) Add a podcast hosted by Zencast such as https://media.zencast.fm/better-known/rss
2) Keep it in your subscriptions.
3) Once in a while, when opening Antennapod, the album art from such podcasts shows up as blank with the title of the podcast in place of the art.
4) Sometimes the album art will finally load by itself or sometimes, the album art will just never show up until the next time you use Antennapod the following day.
5) Randomly, some time later, the album art from such a podcast will go blank when opening Antennapod yet again and you have no idea if it will end up finally loading or not.

I'm not sure what is causing this but I do know that Zencast is not a particularly reliable host because I sometimes have issues downloading episodes from such podcasts. Perhaps it is because Antennapod refreshes album art when opening and it can't get a good connection to Zencast when opening the app? Is Antennapod not caching album art all the time so it doesn't have to re-load the album art so frequently? I'm not familiar with how Antennapod manages album art but I think the combination of a less-than-reliable host and and how Antennapod manages album art results in missing album art once in a while?

[tonytamsf]

@Pentaphon I've noticed similar issues as well. I browse the code for album art, I think the caching is set pretty low (I'll have to find it in the code)

I tested the podcast you mentioned on my Pixel 3, it was very slow to load, but it did load. The issue is with the zencast.fm hosting, but perhaps AntennaPod can do better by
1) Cache the image for much longer, and display that image while...
2) Load from remote and show only once it's been loaded

[ByteHamster]

Is Antennapod not caching album art all the time so it doesn't have to re-load the album art so frequently?

Servers can specify a duration that the image is valid for. AntennaPod re-downloads the image if that time is over. This is necessary to make sure that the publisher can change the image and AntennaPod picks up the change.

I'll have to find it in the code

We don't handle caching ourselves. We just hand the URL over to Glide and it does everything else.

[Pentaphon]

We don't handle caching ourselves. We just hand the URL over to Glide and it does everything else.

Could we have a per-podcast setting to cache the album art so it doesn't keep disappearing when that time is over and the host is less-than-reliable?

[ByteHamster]

No settings for things like this, sorry. Maybe there is a way to have Glide use the old image as placeholder until the new one is loaded. Not sure if this is possible, though.

[Pentaphon]

Maybe there is a way to have Glide use the old image as placeholder until the new one is loaded. Not sure if this is possible, though.

If it is, that would be ideal. It would be good to make sure we always have the main album art in the subscriptions screen.

[ByteHamster]

Sorry, I have not found an option for Glide that allows to still load cached images even if the server considers them outdated. This should be fixed on the host's end.

The blank image could be caused by the network settings. Make sure to allow loading images over mobile networks to prevent empty squares.

[Pentaphon]

Thanks for at least trying, ByteHamster. Looking forward to 2.0 final.