Show HN: Find and Play Podcasts in Your Browser | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Find and Play Podcasts in Your Browser

player.fm

22 pointsmmahemoff17 comments

I'm the creator of Player FM. It's a Rails + HTML5 app and I'd be happy to answer any questions about it here.

Hi Mike, is there any way to sync the podcasts to my iTouch?

The simplest way is to click on the iTunes icon just under the title on your channel page. It will add your channel to iTunes as a single "mix feed" containing all series you've subscribed to on Player FM.

Absolute love the idea. It's something I've been thinking about doing for a while now, but with a slightly different twist. (though I lack the skills myself to code it).

1. I assume you're going to be adding new stuff to it daily ?For example a quick glance in the videogames section and a few 'popular' podcasts I listen to are missing.

2. Would be great if you could "bookmark" a point in a podcast. Here's my thinking. typically I would use this app at work where I can't install itunes. So if I'm in the middle of a podcast and the day is done, I can bookmark and resume tomorrow. (just one simple use case example)

3. Are you planning to add a rating system to it? One of the major problems I have with itunes is it's hard to find stuff because there's just SO MUCH. (doesn't make sense I know..)

All in all great app and I'm sure I'll be on it pretty regular.

p.s. cool domain name, can't believe it wasn't taken!!

Thanks for the feedback. Believe me, I couldn't believe the domain was available either :). Always thought about doing this on podca.st (which I own), but decided to look for something else based on feedback.

1. Yes, curating the featured channels is an ongoing process and ultimately users will be able to curate channels too, beyond their main channel containing their subscriptions. (The mechanism is already in place behind the scenes as all the featured channels are owned by a single "featured" user.) If you have any specific suggestions, please list them here or mail mike@player.fm, thanks.

2. Agree - similar to YouTube's time-based URLs. For sharing a point in the podcast as well as resuming. I think it would be nice to bookmark a time range as well, for sharing/commentary purposes.

3. Definitely want to add ratings. This would be cool for a given podcast series as in iTunes, but an extra benefit here is you'd be able to see how a user rated things in their own channel too.

Sounds good. This will definitely be a service I keep my eye on as it grows.

One more thing, do you have a playlist feature planned?

I don't have any plans at present as I think the channel concept covers at least some of the use cases, as long as people can create multiple channels. You'll notice Player FM keeps playing through the channel once it finishes an episode, so it's a kind of playlist.

What kind of playlist did you have in mind?

for instance, If i wanted to listen to a particular gaming podcast, then a particular science podcast, then back to a gaming...

Got it. You'll definitely be able to do that with a custom channel.

Not picking out this app particularly, because lots do it, but I won't be signing up because of the permissions it requests (from twitter):

    Read Tweets from your timeline.
    See who you follow, and follow new people.
    Update your profile.
    Post Tweets for you.

Post new tweets, maybe. Read my tweets - o...k... (I wouldn't want this if my account was locked, but mine is public). Update my profile, make me follow new people? Definitely not. But for what it's offering, I don't see why it needs to do any of this, and its asking for a lot of trust upfront.

Very much understand this. To be clear, Player FM won't auto-tweet or follow new people unless you ask it to (right now, there's no features like that anyway). I wish Twitter would let the developer include a message about how they'll use the feature on their permission page, as the only alternative right now is to explain it beside the button, which clutters up the user-interface.

In any event, you can hit "traditional signup" if you want to just use your email/password. Or use the Google login.

Thanks for clarifying. I will try it out, it looks interesting.

Have to correct this, as Twitter does actually support a message on the permission page. I've updated that.

Excellent! This is exactly what I was looking for. Some comments: a) Search for podcast (I didn’t see a search window) b) Iam currently using it on my Iphone. The site has more of a desktop browser feel. Can you make it more mobile friendly? With HTML5, CSS3 and some JS framework, lot more could be accomplished on the mobile side.

Glad it's useful.

a) Search is coming. I tried integrating Swiftype (the experiment's running at /docs/search), but perhaps because of their publicity yesterday, it doesn't seem to have been indexed yet. b) Agree it could be better on mobile devices. It's using Twitter Bootstrap for a responsive layout and I've certainly found it usable on the iPod Touch, but the interface, especially the nav bar, could do with some work.

This is really great. Now make an iPhone app that syncs with my subscriptions and notifies me of new episodes, stat!

Also, please add my podcast: http://www.ottawaskeptics.org/the-reality-check

Thanks. No mobile app yet, but for now you can certainly use it on iPhone browser (HTML5 audio integrates surprisingly well with the native playback controls) and you can subscribe to your channel in iTunes using the iTunes icon.

I've stuck a couple of skeptic podcasts in Science channel, but don't want to flood it, so I'll look at adding a separate Skepticism channel as there seems to be enough content for it. And there's already a Spirituality channel to balance it out :).

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