NOTE: I’m hosting podcasts, AntennaPod is showing abusive download behaviors causing multiple complete downloads within a few seconds.
This probably causes your users to pay extra bandwidth costs.
I suspect that each reposition of playback is downloading the whole file again. In my checks, if you used a the Range request header with different values for partial downloads you would not get the 429 (Too many requests) error. I suspect other hosts returning an error for abusive downloads may be the reason for poor streaming behavior.
I’m not a developer and can’t say anything useful, but to thank you for reporting this from your side. We don’t often get such feedback/input, and I’m hoping that it can prove helpful in improving the streaming/downloading.
Hi, are the posted logs from Antennapods settings → report bug menu?
I experienced now several times, that downloading episodes from Podcasts hosted on megaphone.fm (not always) start slow, or with respectable speed, but get then slower and slower, so slow, that the download would never completed… Then it’s even too slow for streaming, buffering every few seconds/minutes. Until trying again later or the next day, and it works with normal speed again. (Downloading episodes hosted on other providers works fine at the same time)
I thought that megaphone is just a shitty host, but in this case I could check the next time if I get error messages too?
I had exact the same problem with Podcasts on Patreon a few times a year ago. But the same things there, downloading from the Patreon website on my laptop worked with fullspeed with the same WiFi connection, but also downloading from the mobile site on my phone, no chance until trying the next day…
The logs are from the web server (mine) not the app.
Different web servers will handle things differently.
code 429 is “too many requests” which means the app should slow down the requests.
Other servers might just slow the delivery so too many identical requests just slow down to the point that maybe streaming isn’t possible any more.
In any case it’s not a good idea to repeat downloads of multi-megabyte objects within seconds. podcast distributions have to pay for bandwidth and wasting it costs $.
Can the app be more careful about not issuing redundant downloads? Maybe on some phones with small memories you have to do that. Maybe the app should only download limited sizes of the podcast at a time?
https://show.hesiod.org/show/show.rss
It’s set up that identical http requests within three or four seconds will fail with code 429 (too many requests).
Also, I understood from @ByteHamster during the Needs: Decision meeting that:
this will probably require some time and dedication to debug and find out what causes this (it’ll be hard for external parties like @jaanton to help, because it requires a lot of trial and error on the side of AntennaPod)
this is unlikely to be related to the issues with jumps while streaming (because streaming is supposed to be done with a bunch of separate requests)
we don’t explicitly send data that indicates if a request concerns a stream or a download, though this info might be deduced from headers
streaming is managed by ExoPlayer, but evenso its traffic is assigned to AntennaPod