Bill Moyers

[charliehversatile]

So Bill Moyers can't be fast forwarded or rewound, and doesn't even show up in Media Player if you say "yes" to "show files in media player". You have to play it from beginning to end, and if you miss something, that's just too bad.

I read in another thread that this means the podcast is not seekable. What does that mean? Why would anyone make a podcast that is unseekable?
How would someone make a podcast unseekable? Why would someone make an hour-long program unseekable? Isn't it just a sound file?

Here's the problem, and this may be a podtrapper bug: if you pause a Bill Moyers program, and while it's paused, you connect the BB to the PC via USB, and enable the flash chip as a usb drive, then (safely) disconnect the usb, even if you don't read or write any files, when you come back to Podtrapper and press "play" it will be as if you pressed fast forward: the elapsed time will show 0,1,2..., the progress bar will show 0%, the remaining/total time will show 49:xx/50:xx, and in reality it will be the last few seconds of the podcast that plays. After the last few seconds has played, a completely different episode of a completely different podcast starts playing.

-Charlie

[marwatk]

Hi Charlie,

'Not seekable' generally only means 'not seekable' by the crappy media decoder on the CDMA devices Everything else, including a similar GSM phone running a similar OS will generally seek it without issue.

Sometimes, though, it's a result of the download being corrupt, generally caused by it having to break it in to pieces to download it. If you can download a copy of the file to your PC, then over to your BB, and have it play, then it may be a download issue. Alternatively, you may try the 'Play in BBMP' menu option and see if that helps.

The interruption by mass storage mode is also a symptom of the CDMA media player, though that one can probably be handled by the latest beta (http://ota.versatilemonkey.com/beta/).

If you see issues like this happen a lot, shoot me a copy of the logs right after you see an issue (preferably while using the latest beta, it always has the best logging), along with a description of what you're seeing. Sometimes I can put device-specific workarounds in place to solve some of them.

-Marcus

[charliehversatile]

Play in BBMP behaves the same for Bill Moyers episodes, with regard to fast forward/rewind. Hrummph!

Say, this is completely off-topic, but I have never gotten Slacker or Pandora to run consistently on my BB. There are 20-second pauses which are not network lag that occur more or less frequently depending on the moon phase. If I click the trackball, the music will continue immediately every time. The Slacker and Pandora people think I'm crazy.

Very few people ever complain about these 20-second pauses, although some do. I figure a lot of people chalk it up to network lag. Could it be that this is related to the crappy decoder on the CDMA BB? That might explain why the complaints are not as widespread as one might expect if the problem affected the entire BB user population.

'Course, the population of all CDMA BB users is still a very large population.

-Charlie

[marwatk]

It's probably a one-off situation. For example, I had an issue I just (finally) fixed on the Storm on OS 5. The media player on that version (and only that version, other versions are unaffected) doesn't send the proper messages to my app saying the player is "ready for seeking", so I wasn't properly resetting that I had seeked, resulting in weird 'revert to start' issues. I finally tracked it down thanks to a bunch of users constantly sending me logs after I tweaked stuff (I don't have a storm to test with here).

I've noticed on some devices (Tour included) that I don't receive normal 'DEVICE_UNAVAIL' messages telling me when the player has been stopped due to interruption from the phone or a calendar alert. I have to detect that it has stopped and resume on my own when I think it's safe. If someone isn't handling that case in their code I could see it stopping and never resuming on its own. There are a ton of these little hacks in my code trying to make everything run smoothly. It's a total PITA

It's also worth noting, now that I think about it, I haven't had to put a single one of these hacks in for a GSM device

Plus, it seems to vary wildly even between minor releases (5.0.328 vs 5.0.350 or whatever). Some just break crap, and the previous and next releases are perfectly fine.

-Marcus

[charliehversatile]

Arrgh! What a heinous development environment that must be for you.

[marwatk]

Definitely makes life interesting Plus, I see it as a barrier to entry for any competitors, heh.

-Marcus

[charliehversatile]

So I'm listening to Bill Moyers, and 45 minutes into the program I accidentally yank my earbuds out and miss a crucial five seconds.

That's it! No option but to restart the program from zero. What could possibly suck more?

Would there be any way to convert these podcasts which don't work right on BB CDMA to another format which does? Something I could do? Something you could do?

-Charlie

[marwatk]

You can convert them locally, from what I remember it's only certain encoders/bitrates/encodings (VBR vs CBR) that have the problem, and switching any one of them will fix it. Let me know if you try it.

-Marcus