I’ve been listening to a lot of podcasts recently; a particular favourite is “Escape Pod“, a weekly podcast which aims to revive the genre of the science-fiction short-story. The standard podcast reciever is iPodder, a very feature rich program that is just too bloated for my needs: I want a cross platform downloader that can be scheduled from UNIX cron and works from the command line.
I went hunting for an alternative client. The best I could find was Bashpodder: a pure bash podcast downloader. Bashpod features some of the best shell-scripting I have ever seen, but even code of this quality is a little bt ugly for me; Of course, what I really wanted was a Python based podcast reciever.
So I created pod.py - a pure Python Podcast reciever. It depends on the excellent 4suite XML processing library to do all the hard XML processing. If you want to try it out, you can get it from my subversion archive: http://svn.stodge.org/pod.py/trunk/
Instructions
1. Get the program: If you want to check the program out, and you have the command-line subversion program installed, you can type:
svn co http://svn.stodge.org/pod.py/trunk/
You also need to download 4suite. On windows you might need to download an run an installer. On Gentoo Linux you might need to type something like:
emerge -uD 4suite
2. Install the program: You can use python’s standard distutils isntaller to help you out:
python setup.py install
The program should now be installed. It’s really easy to use:
3. Use the program:
pod.py url -d downlaod directory
So for example, if I want to download BBC’s “In Our Time” podcast to a folder called ‘my_podcasts’, I can issue the following incantation:
pod.py http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/rmhttp/downloadtrial/radio4/inourtime/rss.xml -d /home/sal/my_podcasts
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