podfetch

Fetch audio or video podcasts and store files locally.

Features

Manage subscriptions through the command line or by editing configuration files.
Download all podcasts with a single command, e.g. as a cron-job.
Hooks to execute additional commands after downloading new episodes.

Usage

To add a subscription:

$ podfetch add http://example.com/rss

To update subscriptions:

$ podfetch update

To list recently downloaded episodes:

$ podfetch ls

Use podfetch --help for more.

Configuration

The central configuration files are * /etc/podfetch.conf for system-wide settings * ~/.config/podfetch/podfetch.conf for user based settings

Configuration options are:

[podfetch]
# where to store downloaded episodes
content_dir = ~/Documents/Podcasts

# filenames for downloaded episodes
filename_template = {pub_date}-{title}

# number of threads for parallel downloads
update_threads = 8

# ignore these files in the subscriptions directory
ignore = .*

[player]
command = /usr/bin/cvlc

Subscriptions

Subscriptions are kept as ini-files under ~/.config/podfetch/subscriptions with one file per feed. The files look like this (url is the only mandatory setting):

[subscription]
url = http://www.example.com/podcast

# maximum number of episodes to keep
max_episodes = 30

# display title
title = My Podcast

# override application wide template for this subscription
filename_template = {title}

# override application config for this subscription
content_dir = /path/to/episodes

# set this to False to stop fetching updates for this subscription
enabled = True

Interesting Directories

~/.config/podfetch: Contains the user-specific config file and the subscriptions/ subdirectory with settings for individual podcasts. Can also contain hooks.
~/.local/share/podfetch: The default location for downloaded episodes and index files where episode details are stored.
~/.cache/podfetch: Recent values from etag and last-modified HTTP headers for each subscription.

Player

Yo can configure any executable as the player command. the command will be called like this:

$CMD /path/to/audio.mp3

For episodes that have multiple local files, the player will be called with multiple arguments like this:

$CMD /path/to/audio-1.mp3 /path/to/audio-2.mp3

Example players are:

/usr/bin/vlc
/usr/bin/cvlc (no UI)
/usr/bin/mplayer