Feature Request: Data-Efficient Downloads with Opus
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I would like Pocket Casts to offer an option for low-bitrate Opus files (e.g., 16–32 kbps) when downloading.
The default 128 kbps MP3 download uses many times more data—for pure speech—without any significant gain in quality. Opus is specifically optimized for speech and delivers clearly intelligible results even at very low bitrates. Anyone who listens to podcasts at 1.5x or 2x speed anyway will notice compression artifacts even less.
A one-hour episode would thus take up only 4–8 MB instead of about 57 MB (128 kbps MP3).
The following would benefit:
- Users with limited data plans
- Users in regions with slow or expensive mobile connections
- Anyone who wants to save many episodes offline
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Pocket Casts doesn’t do any audio process on podcast episodes for download. The app downloads episodes directly from each podcasts host to your device. So the codec and bitrate of the audio files is decided by the podcast creators themselves. If you’d like to suggest that a podcast be made available in a different format, you’d want to reach out to the podcast creator directly.
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Thanks for the reply, but I don’t think this is quite accurate.
You’re right that Pocket Casts downloads episodes directly from the podcast host. But there’s a middle ground that doesn’t require asking podcast creators to change anything: Pocket Casts could run a lightweight transcoding proxy on their end.
The flow would be:
- Pocket Casts fetches the episode from the host (as usual)
- Transcodes it on-the-fly to Opus at e.g. 24 kbps
- Delivers the smaller file to the user
- Optionally caches it briefly for efficiency
This would only need to be active for users who explicitly opt into the feature — so there’s no need to process the entire podcast catalogue upfront. Infrastructure costs stay minimal.
No cooperation from podcast creators is required either. Pocket Casts already acts as the intermediary between host and client; what happens on their servers in between is entirely their implementation detail. And realistically, asking podcast creators to change their encoding is a non-starter anyway — there are hundreds of thousands of them, and most have no incentive or technical means to do so. A proxy-based solution is the only practical path to actually solving this for users.
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