podfm: an extensible podcast aggregator

tindzk · 2010-10-07 17:37:46

podfm is a very lightweight console podcatcher with zero external dependencies.

I've mainly written it to download podcasts from RFI (Radio France International) which offers transcriptions for its journals. However, these are only available in HTML and reading anything else than non-plain files on my Rockbox-based iPod is really painful.

Today I added support for generic RSS feeds making podfm universally applicable.

The installation on Arch Linux is very simple:

pacman -S clang

git clone git://github.com/tindzk/Jivai.git

git clone git://github.com/tindzk/Jivai-Utils.git
cd Jivai-Utils; make; cd ..

git clone git://github.com/tindzk/podfm.git
cd podfm; ./build.sh

Now create a file called "subscriptions.yml" and paste:

rss: ecoute
    url: http://www.ecoute.de/podcast/rss.xml

Then synchronize using this command:

./podfm.bin

For the complete documentation please refer to: http://tindzk.github.com/podfm/

In case somebody wants to write plugins for other services, I'd be happy to include them.

Last edited by tindzk (2010-10-07 17:38:08)

Daenyth · 2010-10-07 18:00:38

How does this compare to bashpodder?

tindzk · 2010-10-07 18:16:08

Daenyth wrote:

How does this compare to bashpodder?

It's difficult to compare these two as the aims are very different.

bashpodder is not really portable as it depends on many external programs. Its functionality is limited to just downloading all enclosures within a feed (and maintaining a cache with already downloaded ones).

podfm, however, aims to be a full-fledged but simple podgrabber. Currently it features:

* Sweet output with useful error reporting and progress bars
* Saving transcriptions (if the plugin supports it)
* Grouping podcasts by subjects (you can say: all news podcasts shall go into "News" whereas comedy-related ones into "Fun" or something)
* No external dependencies (no runtime or libraries are needed, you can use the binary on pretty much any system with glibc installed)

Probably negligable but podfm is also really fast: It doesn't do any unnecessary syscalls and was written with simplicity in mind. So the only bottleneck should be the internet connection.

Last edited by tindzk (2010-10-07 18:18:26)

Arch Linux

#1 2010-10-07 17:37:46

podfm: an extensible podcast aggregator

#2 2010-10-07 18:00:38

Re: podfm: an extensible podcast aggregator

#3 2010-10-07 18:16:08

Re: podfm: an extensible podcast aggregator

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