2011-12-22, 18:10
What Is It?
This is a small application designed to be run as a cron job on a headless Linux setup.
What's It Do?
It automatically downloads new audio podcasts, parses their details from the feed, and then does the filenames & tags so that the podcasts will look good in media players like XBMC.
Installation
This program runs as a bash script. You will need to install the prerequisites, but if you're running Ubuntu they are all in the default repositories and a single apt-get can get you where you need to be:
sudo apt-get install eyeD3 xsltproc wget mp3gain
After installing the pre-reqs, just download the files to whereever you want, edit the settings, give the main script executable rights, and you should be ready to run. I am running this hourly using the following item in crontab:
/home/patrick/Ichapod/ichapod.sh>>/var/www/logs/ichapod-runlog-`date +\%Y-\%m-\%d`.log
The first half is just the script's full address. I am piping the output to the /var/www/logs folder, which means I can go to my web server to check the log output. Obviously you don't HAVE to do this, you can send the logs anywhere. The filename portion of things is just auto-generating a log with today's date, like ichapod-runlog-2011-12-21.log.
I've got this project hosted on GitHub. The script itself is actually fairly well commented so between that and my documentation you should be able to get it working without too much effort.
History
This project got indirectly inspired by you folks in this forum. I ended up running a headless Linux box to host SABnzbd, Transmission, SickBeard, CouchPotato, etc. One of the types of media I didn't have a good "solution" for was podcasts.
My biggest beef was that I have a lot of nice media player solutions on various platforms (on the computer I use Songbird and XBMC, on my phone I run UberMusic and PlayerPro), and none of them had what I felt was a "good" way to do podcasts in a centralized way. My idea was to run something in my server alongside my other apps, which could then get the podcasts, process them so they work nicely in my media players, and then stick them where I can use them (into the appropriate Samba share, sync to phone, etc). Gpodder had pretty much all the options I wanted, BUT it currently has no headless option. Googling found me Bashpodder, which works, but puts out really unfriendly files. Surprisingly, most podcasts don't give you files with proper ID3 tags on them, their filenames are really inscrutable, and you can forget about artwork! Bashpodder was my original inspiration, though my code doesn't bear a lot of resemblance to it anymore
.
I have gotten it to the point where it's working well for my everyday use, so its ready for beta status
This is a small application designed to be run as a cron job on a headless Linux setup.
What's It Do?
It automatically downloads new audio podcasts, parses their details from the feed, and then does the filenames & tags so that the podcasts will look good in media players like XBMC.
Installation
This program runs as a bash script. You will need to install the prerequisites, but if you're running Ubuntu they are all in the default repositories and a single apt-get can get you where you need to be:
sudo apt-get install eyeD3 xsltproc wget mp3gain
After installing the pre-reqs, just download the files to whereever you want, edit the settings, give the main script executable rights, and you should be ready to run. I am running this hourly using the following item in crontab:
/home/patrick/Ichapod/ichapod.sh>>/var/www/logs/ichapod-runlog-`date +\%Y-\%m-\%d`.log
The first half is just the script's full address. I am piping the output to the /var/www/logs folder, which means I can go to my web server to check the log output. Obviously you don't HAVE to do this, you can send the logs anywhere. The filename portion of things is just auto-generating a log with today's date, like ichapod-runlog-2011-12-21.log.
I've got this project hosted on GitHub. The script itself is actually fairly well commented so between that and my documentation you should be able to get it working without too much effort.
History
This project got indirectly inspired by you folks in this forum. I ended up running a headless Linux box to host SABnzbd, Transmission, SickBeard, CouchPotato, etc. One of the types of media I didn't have a good "solution" for was podcasts.
My biggest beef was that I have a lot of nice media player solutions on various platforms (on the computer I use Songbird and XBMC, on my phone I run UberMusic and PlayerPro), and none of them had what I felt was a "good" way to do podcasts in a centralized way. My idea was to run something in my server alongside my other apps, which could then get the podcasts, process them so they work nicely in my media players, and then stick them where I can use them (into the appropriate Samba share, sync to phone, etc). Gpodder had pretty much all the options I wanted, BUT it currently has no headless option. Googling found me Bashpodder, which works, but puts out really unfriendly files. Surprisingly, most podcasts don't give you files with proper ID3 tags on them, their filenames are really inscrutable, and you can forget about artwork! Bashpodder was my original inspiration, though my code doesn't bear a lot of resemblance to it anymore
.I have gotten it to the point where it's working well for my everyday use, so its ready for beta status
