I've cleaned up and re-structured the script to make it easier to read
and maintain. Bashpodder is also now smart enough to detect your
bittorrent version and do the right thing. Also added the much
requested feature of only downloading the latest show in a feed. Rather
than blathering on I shall simply post the helpful README file that
I've included in the new package.

If you are interested read on..

It has few dependencies and should run on most linux or unix systems. It can be
configured to only download a set number of shows from each feed. It also has
bittorrent support.

#Setting up bashpodder

copy the contents of the tar archive into a directory where you want
your podcasts to get downloaded to. My copy of bashpodder and its
accessory scripts live in $HOME/podcasts

The urls for the feeds you want to subscribe to go in bp.conf . The
version you just downloaded contains the feeds that I listen to. Feel
free to delete them if they are not to your taste.

You should now run the check_dependencies script. This will tell you if
you have all the necessary software installed to run bashpodder.
Bittorrent is optional. If you don't subscribe to any bittorrent feeds
then you don't have to install bittorrent.

#Configuration

There are a number of variables within the bashpodder script that can be
changed to alter bashpodder's behaviour.

limit_downloads=

set this to 1 to limit the number of items bashpodder will download from
a single feed.

download_limit=

set this to the number of items you wish to download from each feed.
Only has an effect if limit_downloads is set to 1.

incremental=

set this to 0 so that bashpodder will only download items that appeared
in the feed since you last ran bashpodder. Set to 1 and bashpodder will
work its way through old items in feeds until all items are downloaded.

selfish=

set to 1 so that bashpodder will not seed torrents that it has
downloaded.

#Usage

./bashpodder.shell

will download all podcasts into a directory YEAR-MM-DD. Then creates a
playlist called podcast.m3u within that directory.
#Accessory scripts

check_dependencies
——————
lets you know if you have all the right software installed for
bashpodder to work.

HTTPDate
——–
small perl script to do date parsing. Allows bashpodder to work out
which shows in a feed are most recent.

btpodder3.4.py and btpodder.py
——————————
these scripts allow bashpodder to download bittorrent distributed
podcasts.

Download the package.

Happy Podcatching,

Huw

The new btpodder.

The btpodder for version 3.4 of BitTorrent.

The podcast.log format differs slighlty from the original bashpodder. To be safe you may want to run bashpodder.shell -nograb to write out a new log first time around.

The new script can be found here.

this version of bashpodder is only kept around for historical reasons.

If you are looking for a command-line podcatcher that supports bittorrent then try Peapod. This is superior in every way to bashpodder and is being actively maintained.

I’ve put a version of bashpodder.shell up on the site. This one will
fetch podcasts from bittorent as well as http and ftp, and then write
the podcast.m3u once it’s done.

Get it here.

Here it is.

You'll need version 3.4 of bittorrent to use this script.

I did some cleaning of the scrip on saturday afternoon to make it deal
with disconnection in a more sane manner, and also to take advantage of
wget's ability to recomence a download that has already started. This
means that bashpodder should be a bit less of bandwidth whore in the
future.

I subscribed to the RSS feed of evilgeniuschronicles.
All was well until I looked in my download directory to see lots of
*.mp3.torrent files. Bummer.  Drunk on success I thought "I shall
now go forth and add bittorrent support to bashpodder". BitTorrent is
wriiten in python so I thought there was probably a good chance to get
where I wanted to go since I already know python. There is even a
command-line script called btdownloadheadles.py. However like most
bittorrent clients this stays open until it's explicitly killed. This
wasn't the behaviour I was looking for but I figured it wouldn't take
too much tweaking to get it to exit on success or failure. Six hours
later at four in the morning I finally gave up and went to bed.
Throwing sys.exit(0) anywhere in the code just disn't seem to work.

After a good sleep it took me about ten minutes to work out what had
been outfoxing me for hours. The bittorrent code treats a sys.exit(0)
as an error state. So you end up in the generic error function. By
adding a sys.exit(1) into the error function I could finally get the
damn thing to exit. I tidied it up to add some checks in the error
function so that it calls sys.exit(0) is it got there by receiving
sys.exit(0) else it exits with a non-zero error code.

Of course now that I I've got working code the egr feed has gone down so I can't test it. It'll just have to wait till tommorow.