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Written by Marco Arment on 2024-12-27 at 02:52

It was still MP3, but I tried VBR encoding.

In 2016, I wrote: https://marco.org/2016/08/15/vbr-mp3-plea

ATP: https://atp.fm/182

It worked! The following year's Apple OSes (iOS 11+) implemented support for all three VBR-seek-table standards — MLLT, VBRI, and Xing/LAME-tag.

ATP: https://atp.fm/228

But when I later tried releasing ATP in VBR with all three tags, we got so many problem reports from Android users that I went back to CBR after one episode:

https://atp.fm/244

https://ioc.exchange/@whophd/113717975279161741

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Written by Marco Arment on 2024-12-27 at 03:00

I've never thought to try it again.

The same benefits and risks would still apply. CBR is INCREDIBLY wasteful for podcasts, but I bet lots of platforms still don't seek properly in long VBR MP3s.

One solution could be adding multi-enclosure-format support to the podcast ecosystem, where we offer modern clients a list of formats and let them pick more advanced ones if they support them.

But I bet ZERO big DAI platforms, and therefore zero popular podcasts, would support it.

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Written by Marco Arment on 2024-12-27 at 03:08

I'd say podcast tech "moves very slowly", but even that's generous — podcast tech hardly moves at all.

But that's a GOOD THING!

Most efforts to move podcast tech "forward" have failed due to insufficient adoption. But most would’ve meant more potential for platform lock-in and increased ad-tech and tracking possibilities, either by design or as unintended consequences.

Podcasts' technical simplicity is not a problem to be solved — it's a defense from platform vultures and ad-tech assholes.

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Toot

Written by Heals :heart_nb: on 2024-12-27 at 09:51

@marcoarment it's not limited to podcasts either - most major streaming platforms still require you to feed them CBR video streams which is equally wasteful and taxing on their streamers uplink and their ingress servers but apparently easier on their live transcoding??

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