boosts appreciated!

does anybody know a podcast app that blocks ads?

@peachymist how would that even work? unless the start/end timestamps of the ads are specified somewhere

@peachymist android, ios, desktop?

@noisytoot are you talking about sponsors that the people in the podcast talk about or about ads that are added to the feed automatically when you press play/download the episode? because i'm talking about the second, i suppose they are just as blockable as the ads in youtube for example

@kayttaja android, sorry

@peachymist antennapod maybe

@peachymist like… the audio ads that are stitched into the episode MP3 file?

Have never heard of this, but it’s a great idea. :)

@kayttaja nope, antennapod is exactly the one i'm using and it does have ads

@peachymist oh haha

@scott yeah, i'm pretty tired of those

@peachymist I'm talking about the first type, I didn't know the latter type was even a thing. Since a podcast is just an RSS feed containing links to audio files, any extra ads would presumably have to be added by the podcast client. In which case blocking ads wouldn't be required, just not using a client with the antifeature of adding them in the first place. I use/recommend AntennaPod (Android) and gPodder (desktop)

@noisytoot i use antennapod, however it does serve feeds that inject ads, i made this post exactly bc i got frustrated at ads being injected in a podcast i was listening to there

@noisytoot i'm not sure but my theory is that these ads are inserted by whichever site is providing the feed, apple podcasts, i heart radio, any of the other tens of sites that offer feeds out there. unless the RSS feed is coming from a creator's own site, they seem to have ads inserted at some point, the same way websites have ads inserted in them

@peachymist @noisytoot it is injected, but not by the platforms, usually it is sold by the podcasts themselves, and the ads are injected in a targeted manner. I'm 90% sure they come from the feed already with ads for you

@peachymist @noisytoot i.e. without the original audio files i don't think you can escape them, i think it is injected by whoever is serving the rss feed

@agatha @noisytoot all the more need to have a podcast app that blocks those the same way we have yt clients that block ads. i can't fathom why apparently no one has made this yet

@peachymist @noisytoot thing is i don't think you can. i think the file you download already has the ads in them

@agatha @peachymist I see, I didn't know that was a thing. How do they fingerprint you to target them if you're not authenticated in any way? All they'd have to go on are IP address and HTTP headers

@noisytoot @peachymist i believe it is just IP based. with a vpn i get ads from that country

@noisytoot @peachymist so, not targeted exactly, bad choice of words

@agatha @noisytoot but aren't they injected in a targeted manner? for example i just got an ad in portuguese in an english language podcast. if they aren't inherently in the podcast file, there must be a way to avoid them getting added in the first place

@peachymist @noisytoot i think when your client (whichever it is) requests the audio, what you get back already has the ip-based ads, i don't think you can strip the audio back to its raw form? i can be wrong but it would explain why no one does it

@agatha @peachymist if you could fetch the same file from multiple IP addresses in different countries and somehow diff the audio files, you could cut out the segments that differ to remove the ads

@noisytoot @peachymist now that it's a fancy idea

@noisytoot @agatha it's probably doable but i suppose no one has figured it out yet, hence why i can't find any app that does it

@peachymist @noisytoot this assumes the ads are all on the same spots which may also not be the case exactly, i have had ads interrupting phrases before

@peachymist not a general solution, but if the podcast is hosted on youtube you could use pipepipe (https://f-droid.org/en/packages/InfinityLoop1309.NewPipeEnhanced/) which is a newpipe fork with sponsorblock built in

@peachymist @noisytoot @agatha
can you send me a feed of a podcast that do that? I am curious about something

@jiub oh i'm a big fan of pipepipe! it's just that some stuff is not on youtube

@passocacornio this one does, although it doesn't show up in all episodes, it's really confusing (i got the feed link directly from antennapod btw)
https://rss.pdrl.fm/795065/feeds.megaphone.fm/ROOSTER1044439796

@peachymist miau miau thanks :3

@peachymist I believe the ads provider is this thing over here

mgln.ai

so it might be possible to use NetGuard to block ads from megaphone.fm

let me test here, because I am kinda curious now

@peachymist this is complicated and not AntennaPod's fault (its OSS to check!) the ads are fused into the audio file dynamically by the host/network (i.e Pinecast, ACast, Spotify) basically the CDN

with some ML/Whisper analysis tricks you could detect ads, but that's a whole processing pipeline, not really suitable for a phone...?

if you VPN to another country your injected ads might switch to German/etc which might be easier to detect?

challenging

@peachymist this is why downloading a 4 year old episode of 99pi (hosted then by PRX and now by Sirius XM) gets up to date ads

note some exceptions like Channel 0, the authors add ad breaks to get edited in, but I suspect this is manual editing

either way the media file doesnt change

oh oh oh!!! you could have a server w VPNs in many countries and download the same file N times and then diff the files for sections that have and havent changed :3 lotta bandwidth tho.