Dreaming of chapters

[vico]

Security Now is a very informative podcast, no doubt about it. In practice it means that Steve spends sometimes several minutes providing minute technical details of one of the latest security breach or vulnerability. That's awesome and often exciting and interesting. But sometimes I would like to quickly skip to the next chapter. Yes, I can fast forward, but, especially when driving in a car, it is not easy to find the correct spot.

Some very popular podcast players support MP3 Chapters standard

id3v2-chapters-1.0 - ID3.org

It allows for displaying a list of chapters and navigating between them. It also have some fancy features like embedding titles, link URLs, and images. So when Steve talks about a picture of the week, the picture could be automatically shown in a podcast player.

Okay, I am not asking for all the advanced features but... sometimes, when frustrated by skipping back nad forth, I dream about chapters in the Security Now podcast.

 

[Kermit]

+1. Many of my favourite podcasts use chapters and have different pictures per chapters. It’s disappointing TWIT podcasts don’t take advantage of these features. It’s especially annoying the show notes aren’t in the podcast and you have go elsewhere to view them; not a very good customer experience.

 

[PHolder]

You're asking the wrong person. @Steve doesn't produce or host the content, that is all on TWiT (Steve is busy enough just prepping the show notes to be able to present the content.) Head over to https://www.twit.community/ and open a Feedback thread and ask there... See what Leo has to say about the idea.

 

[vico]

Thank you, @PHolder for your feedback. Your are correct, it is on TWiT. On the other hand, I know that Steve does deeply care about the podcast. Take the transcripts or the 16k downloads. for example. So, Steve could probably influence how the TWiT team publishes his work.

Let's my post be a gentle reminder that, after so many years, chapter markers could be more useful to the audience than 16k downloads. That's all.

 

[PHolder]

I'm not disparaging your idea @vico, just suggesting that @Steve keeps pretty busy, and probably doesn't have much opportunity to investigate the inner workings of podcasting technology. The thing that will most quickly persuade Leo to adopt anything is if he can see the advantage (or if lots of users are clamouring for it.) The potential downside of any chapter application is it could make it easier to skip ads, and Leo's advertisers would NOT be for that, so neither would Leo.

 

[Kermit]

Good ads don’t need skipping but how many Squarespace adds does one need to listen too.

 

[danlock]

Good ads don’t need skipping but how many Squarespace adds does one need to listen too.

As many as have been paid for.