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Is there a sponsor block situation for Podcasts? (sh.itjust.works)

submitted 1 year ago by akilou@sh.itjust.works to c/piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com

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I'm happy to adopt a new podcast app if it has sponsorblock natively or through a plug-in. Otherwise let me know if there's some other way to make it work. I don't see why it wouldn't work as all of the segments tagged for skipping are crowdsourced which would also work for Podcasts.

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[-] gurgle@aussie.zone 2 points 1 year ago

Because a lot of podcast networks have dynamically inserted ads that change based on your geolocation, I've found that my Pihole can often provide a feed without any ads. I assume it's like a fallback in case the geolocating fails. So I set Pocketcasts to only download episodes on my home network.

[-] dnbjqbp@aussie.zone 1 points 1 year ago

Can you prove any more info on this? Is the pihole automatically stopping the ads from downloading? It sound like it's at least a partial solution.

[-] gurgle@aussie.zone 1 points 1 year ago

So without having looked into it really, my assumption is that these podcast hosts will serve a specific file based on the response to an API call. If my Pihole blocks that call, they don't want to serve nothing, so they fallback to a file that sometimes has "generic" ads (often for US-based companies) or other times no ads at all. Of course this doesn't work for all podcasts, and as mentioned sometimes still has ads anyway. One day I might look more closely into it.

[-] dnbjqbp@aussie.zone 1 points 1 year ago

Ah, I assume the audio file is being put together server side and customised to the downloaders locality. The pihole is likely obfuscating that and causing a default version to be downloaded