Armangil's Podcatcher

I've been looking for a way to have my server download podcasts, rather than my desktop machine. The main reason is that I'm running Juice on Windows, and I don't have Windows running that often. I have to reboot into XP to grab the latest; then I switch back to Linux. Sure, I could run the Linux version of Juice/iPodder, but I hope to get this function off the desktop completely.

I downloaded version 3.0.0 here, and extracted it to a folder in my home folder - just to play. I also had to install Ruby on the machine.

The extract command is: tar zxvf podcatcher-3.0.0.tar.gz

To install Ruby: sudo apt-get install ruby

To give it a try, I ran it using the demo OPML file:

ruby bin/podcatcher demo/subscriptions.opml


The screen displays #EXT3MU, and then nothing else for a long while. Be patient!

(I should point out that I'm running this test on my play LAMP server, which is a 300MHz powerhouse with 196MB of RAM. It should be better on the production file server.)

After some time, the latest file in each feed was downloaded to the cache folder. Not bad.

There are a lot of parameters/switches available to fine tune the behavior. I can have it grab more than just the latest, get all since a date, direct to other folders, and much more. Looks like I have some experimentation ahead.