Of all the articles I've read in my life ... that was one of them.

I don't even know where to start, though I'll try.

I access a lot of media, in different forms, much of if online: articles, books. And quite a bit of spoken or video content.

Most of what counts as "podcast" listening for me comes rather from YouTube, mostly as recorded lectures or interviews. The better material tends to run 10 - 60 minutes, though it can occasionally go over (most ideas, and speakers, as well as myself run out of steam after about an hour).

With few exceptions, I tend not to follow any podcasts as such particularly religiously. There are a few exceptions. I raised a stink some months back when the CBC blocked my podcasting app (Podcast Republic) from accessing its content, on the exceedingly slim pretext that PR's occasional text banner ads constituted "commercial use" -- and the stink was raised specifically because Paul Kennedy's Ideas is a very nearly uniformly excellent program. Unusual, intelligent speakers, outside the Overton window, and generally not heard on other programs.

The other regular programme is WNYC's On the Media, which is also excellent, and largely serves as the breech in the news dike I've erected -- a once-a-week dose of reality seems to be about right for my constitution, if perhaps not the US Constitution....

But ... other than those two (and they're excellent), I mostly prefer queuing up a set of related items, and working my way through them. Even with podcasts, what I'm often aiming for is to string up a set of programmes or episodes that I'm currently interested in listening to. My listening doesn't follow any particular schedule.

For YouTube or other downloadable content, the best solution is often to simply download the material (and usually simply the audio), and to queue it up on VLC.

(I've previously noted on HN that this is possible on Android if you install the Termux and Termux-API aps, the termux-api shell tools, python, and via pip, youtube-dl.)

The Android environment is still sufficiently fuxnored that for a long playlist -- say, the 48 episodes, 30 minutes each, of David Christian's Big History lectures -- your best bet is to download everything first, then queue up the set. It isn't possible to do the Linux equivalent of constructing a playlist and running, say, mplayer over it:

<playlist while read file; do mplayer "$file"; done

(Though it may be possible to construct a playlist file and run it.)

VLC won't directly stream YouTube or other online video content on Android. So no dice setting up a playlist along those lines.

What's proved most annoying is that the software I've experimented with to date simply doesn't retain or sustain specified lists. Podcast Republic allows items to be added to various lists ... but they vanish within seconds (I've reported the bug). VLC allows queueing up of multiple items, but doesn't really seem to sustain that list very well. And trying to find and utilise the playist files that do exist is ... awkward at best.

Beyond this, when playing content, the controls for managing playback ... don't exist.

Mplayer is awesome on Linux as there are keyboard mappings to skip backwards or forwards within a track, across tracks, speed up or slow down playback, or pause. When I'm following a lecture, all of those are employed.

VLC offers none of this.

Podcast Republic has a GUI control to skip forward and backwards (15s) within a track, which is quite useful. But there's no keyboard mapping.

Short of all of this: there's some truly amazing content out there. Tools for accessing and programming it from a user's PoV are sorely lacking.