However, Plex already supports Music libraries. Similar to how we already populate our own Movie and TV Show libraries, creating a “Podcasts” library is as simple as software to download and store podcast episodes on our media servers.
In the interest of being positive, can we discuss the best way to build a DIY podcast library? What desktop software is available for this?
I saw a recommendation for PodGrab, which uses Docker. Any other suggestions, or a helpful “how-to” for users who are less tech-savvy?
But your podcasts will play through Plex Media Player which doesn’t know much about podcasts and does stuff like when you hit FF instead of FF’ing a certain number of seconds will simply skip to the end! Wait a second… So did the old Plex podcast player… Nevermind.
Also, to me, podcasts need to be constantly refreshed, notated where you are at in a podcast, and importantly, removed after listening. None of these functions apply to Plex “podcasts as a music library”.
For me, listening to podcasts is done mostly on my phone through earbuds when I’m doing the dishes or walking, etc., or a lot of the time connected to Android Auto in my car. Also, the podcasts are long, some up to 2 hours. Skipping forward to skip commercials and the podcast player remembering where I was at in the various podcast episodes I have is essential. Hitting the FF button on my steering wheel and having the current episode where I was at say 45 minutes into a 2-hour podcast and the player switches to the next episode is deadly. I mean what am I to do to get back to 45:20 into that episode when I’m driving down I-5?
You can set a Music library to remember your track progress, I already do this for audiobooks.
In theory, a podcast downloader could automatically delete episodes after they have been heard through partnership with something that’s aware of Plex hooks… that’s part of what I’d like help to brainstorm.
Getting all the functionality except old episode deletion I think would get us most of the way there, as podcasts are quite small (considering) when you compare with MKVs.
However, some of the points you are making may suggest that Plex is not a great interface for podcasts anyway. I do struggle with wanting to use Plex as my default music player, though ergonomically chafing against the minimalism of Plexamp or the maximalism of the Plex web/desktop player.
Yeah but the Plex interface sucks for podcasts. There is no way to change it such that FF/REW work as needed for a podcast to handle the use case I described. I would think it would be a common use case to… I mean who wants to listen to the same commercial episode after episode?!? I cannot, for the life of me, wonder why it seems so hard to allow the user to configure what the default < and > buttons do and say be able to configure “REW 30 seconds, FF 60 seconds”. I mean how much coding would be involved? It would be useful for music too as I’m a musician and often wish to listen to that guitar solo again without having to rewind to 0 and listened to the whole song again. If this cannot be set for podcasts then the Plex Player is worthless to me as a podcast player. Additionally, such a thing would not work to keep my place in Podcast Addict and in Plex in sync. It’s an all-or-nothing thing for me and unless they can get REW/FF configurable, Plex is a dead issue for me WRT playing podcasts.
@adefaria FF / RW functionality depends upon the client. On the Shield TV there are dedicated buttons for this that work with Plex.
However, this is off-topic from this discussion. Hoping those interested in using Plex Media Server for podcasts can chip in with ideas for “stocking” a server with podcast content automatically.
But that’s the point. Who really cares if you can download podcasts into Plex if you can’t really play them? Podcasts are portable too. I’m not getting a Shield TV in my car or am gonna walk around with one.
Podgrab is what I’ve come up with as well. Currently trying to get it deployed with a dedicated Plex library. I’ll try and do a how-to if it works as I’m hoping.
It’s wonderful how Plex continuously removes the very features that brought us all to the platform and bought PlexPass to use. Photo sync, local network access, now podcasts, while they add crap like commercials and Netflix wannabe features none of us want. Newsflash Plex… Netflix is losing market share more and more but you keep following all the other lemmings right off the cliff. Bravo if your goal was to tank this app.
