Thanks to Marcus Mangelsdorf for pointing out this feature no longer works. Pocket Casts has now added the ability to upload files and cloud stoarage to their Plus offering.

The downside is it’s no longer free, the upside is that it’s much easier to manage the files and the process isn’t as convoluted.
Pocket Casts detailed information on what kind of media is supported from which platform.
Updated: Oct 31st, 2019

This is now out-of-date. See update above.

I recently had a strange issue with a certain podcast not loading on my phone. For some reason, the phone can’t load the domain even though it works from my computer on the same network. And the phone fails to load the page on cellular and wifi. So I set out to see if I could manually load the episodes into Pocket Casts.

I’ve used this for a couple of shows and single audio files and it works great. The instructions are for Android.

  1. Locate the custom_episodes folder. By default it’s located here: /storage/emulated/0/Android/data/ au.com.shiftyjelly.pocketcasts/files/PocketCasts
  2. Move your episode files into the folder
  3. Open Pocket Casts and refresh by tapping on the Pocket Casts icon in the side menu.
  4. You now find a Custom Episodes podcast in your Podcasts tile screen, tap it to view the list of custom episodes.

Note: Only the following file types are supported: mp3, m4a, aac, mov, m4v, mp4, 3g2 and 3gp.
Note: Pocket Casts will only pick up files in the custom_episodes folder, not any sub-folders.