Often does not download queued podcasts even if left running for a long time with WiFi.

[James Lewis]

I often load podbird while in the office, and it runs for hours with a fast WiFi connection... but does not download the queued podcasts... then I end up having to stream them while mobile.

I get the impression it only downloads one podcast per run, or often fails to move to the next one.

It would be nice if podbird could wake up at scheduled times, or perhaps every few hours and download all new/queued podcasts if a WiFi network is available.... I don't know if Ubuntu can do this, but there is an alarm application, so there must be some way to do this.

[Nekhelesh Ramananthan (nik90)]

We are using Ubuntu Download manager to download podcasts in the background, but the download queue itself is a simple js array. So when podbird is sent to the background, after finishing a download, it doesn't go automatically to the next download since it is suspended. We will have to transition to using the Ubuntu Download Manager queue API.

Podbird cannot wake up at scheduled times since the platform doesn't support doing that. Alarms API only triggers a notification and doesn't allow an app to wake itself up and doing some action.

[James Lewis (james-fsck)]

I mentioned the latter part to Alan Pope, he agreed that some way for apps to wake up and perform background tasks would be a good feature for the OS..... Perhaps its could be arranged, i bet Dekko would love that too.

[Nekhelesh Ramananthan (nik90)]

As a bonus, we are also integrating with the file/progress indicator ;)