[FR] Subscribing to channels with infrequent uploads in Apple Podcasts

[robertkleinschuster]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
I am using Apple Podcasts with Pinchflat and have the problem that I want to subscribe to channels that upload very seldom now but uploaded often in the past. The problem with Apple Podcasts is that It does not allow to follow empty feeds.
To add these channels to Apple Podcasts would require me to manually lookup the last date each channel uploaded and set that as the cutoff date.

I don't want to download old videos but at the same time get new videos into my feed in the app.

Describe the solution you'd like
A way to set the cutoff as a count limit (download and keep newest 10 videos) instead of the cutoff date / retention period combination.

Having a toggle to switch between "Keep videos for x Days" and "Keep latest x Videos"

Describe alternatives you've considered
Adding a dummy entry to empty feeds to allow them to be subscribed in the Apple Podcasts app.

Additional context
I generally find it a bit weird and confusing with the cutoff date / retention period at the moment.
Maybe you can describe in more detail why you implemented it this way please.

[kieraneglin]

Thanks for the suggestion!

That's an insane behaviour from Apple Podcasts - I would not have expected that to be the case. I'll look into this and see what I can come up with, but I'll admit from the start that my day job has been busy lately so I'm not sure when I'll get to this. In the meantime, I might recommend you index the source with a cutoff date set to today and then just manually download one video

As for "why", there's a few things to go over:

• I chose date-based instead of count-based deletion due to "popular" demand (Feature Request: delete old media after a certain time frame #113 (comment))
• Cutoff date + retention period makes a few in-app operations way easier. I'm struggling to put this to words, but the gist is that going by date is an objective measurement that can be verified per-video. On the other hand, count-based is subjective based on how many videos have been indexed at that point-in-time. If a long-running initial index is taking place and new content is found by fast indexing it gets much more complicated to determine what media should be kept. Not impossible - just more complex
• Cutoff date + retention has a side benefit of being able to emulate a rolling window of downloads. So if a user wants to only keep the last 3 months of videos at any point-in-time, you can use cutoff date + retention to do that without introducing a new concept just for that (see [FR] Time based downloads #376)

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Anyway, I'll look into it as time permits! I can't promise that I'll implement any changes here since manually downloading a video is a pretty simple workaround, but if I think changes are needed then I'll do it 💪

[robertkleinschuster]

Thank you for the suggestion, I didn't think of the manual option. I will do that for now.

I think it is workable as is but there is definitely room for improvement in the future.

Apple Podcasts behaves as is documented here: https://podcasters.apple.com/support/823-podcast-requirements
They changed it lately to say "submit" but adding feeds manually in the app also seems to check these requirements.