Support for .mp3/.m4a embedded chapters

[mitchdowney]

This feature was first requested in podverse-fdroid. Please see the description and screenshot in that ticket, but use this ticket going forward. podverse/podverse-fdroid#47

[mitchdowney]

I think this feature is blocked until chapters can be extracted from ID3 tags in react-native-track-player. doublesymmetry/react-native-track-player#1439

[Inrumpo]

I think this feature is blocked until chapters can be extracted from ID3 tags in react-native-track-player. doublesymmetry/react-native-track-player#1439

This might be the case for .mp3 and .m4a chapters. Podlove Simple Chapters are stored in / written to the RSS feed. Podverse should be able to read them like any other tag.

[mitchdowney]

@Inrumpo good point. I'm going to create a separate issue for PSC chapters since they're fundamentally different than mp3/m4a chapters.

[Inrumpo]

A similar issue has been opened for the popular Pocket Casts Android client that has gone open source lately.
Maybe there is or will be some useful insight concerning .m4a chapters:
Automattic/pocket-casts-android#393

[mitchdowney]

@Inrumpo thanks for the update. We'd still like to add this, but it's blocked until #1179 is completed. After that is finished, we may have to make a PR into react-native-track-player to extract the chapter data.

[mitchdowney]

I think this is blocked due to react-native-track-player not supporting the ability to grab any metadata tag we want.

doublesymmetry/react-native-track-player#2008

[erifneerg]

From what it seems, the issue has been resovled @mitchdowney in issue doublesymmetry/react-native-track-player# 2118. Hopeful this allows embedded chapters to be used in the app.

[mitchdowney]

@erifneerg wow thanks for the update! It appears according to the release notes that the chapters metadata is only available on iOS, not Android...I'd like to find out why Android isn't supported yet before embarking on feature support for this.

Also, I'm actually thinking seriously about beginning a full rewrite of the mobile app...and possibly the api...and possibly the whole Podverse tech stack 😳 it's over 5 years old at this point, and there are a TON of features in it I never imagined when beginning Podverse (mostly Podcasting 2.0 features).

If we go the full rewrite direction, then I would only be making bug fixes for the existing Podverse mobile app, and would save a new feature like mp3 embedded chapter support for the next version.