Medregator --- The simple media aggregator (podcatcher | podcast / vidcast downloader)

About

Medregator (formally PodMeUp) is a simple media aggregator (sometimes referred to as a podcatcher). It is used to subscribe to podcast or vidcast feeds and download new content when available allowing you to easily access your favourite podcast or vidcast whenever you choose.

Medregator is designed for quick and easy use, leaving the power in the users hands. It has no GUI, and is controlled by simple command line arguments.

Features include:

• Quick and easy to add new feeds or download new episodes.
• Tracks previously downloaded episodes to ensure no duplicates are retrieved.
• Automatically resumes interrupted downloads.
• Supports speed throttling.
• [NEW] Supports sed manipulation of URLs prior to download.

Requirements

Medregator is just a bash script and therefore only requires bash, wget and xsltproc (libxslt).

Having said that, it has only been tested in Linux (and only ArchLinux at that).

Use Case

Here is an example of using Medregator to retrieve the cast Shot Of Jaq. This particular cast offers both MP3 and OGG formats however their RSS feed containing the episodes only lists the MP3s. We therefore use the SED option to change the URLs prior to retrieval.

Command:

medregator -a http://feeds.feedburner.com/ShotOfJaq -T Shot_Of_Jaq -D ShotOfJaq -S 's/mp3$/ogg/'

Broken down this is:

• -a http://feeds.feedburner.com/ShotOfJaq
  • -a is adding a feed, and we provide it's address
• -T Shot_Of_Jaq
  • -T means we're giving the show our own title. If no Directory name is provided, the Title is used for the Directory name. If no Title is provided, the Title is (hopefully) extracted from the feed. At present, the Title isn't used for anything (except the Directory name if not specified, as stated earlier).
• -D ShotOfJaq
  • -D means we're providing a name for the directory. If we hadn't specified a directory explicitly, one would have been derived from the Title.
• -S 's/mp3$/ogg/'
  • -S means we want the file URL(s) to be manipulated using SED prior to retrieval. Here we're just converting the filename from a mp3 extension, to a .ogg extension, however we could just have easily performed more complex manipulations (such as changing the server to a known proxy address etc).

On success, nothing will be output but a new directory will be created in your Medregator directory. This directory will have the name ShotOfJaq (as specified with -D earlier). Inside this directory will be a few files that are needed by Medregator:

• feed.conf
  • The main config file of Medregator. It contains all the information needed to retrieve and process the feed.
• feed.rss
  • A copy of the feed. It's replaced and parsed each time you do an update.
• feed.chan
  • Contains some processed data extracted from the feed. Most are not currently used however have been extracted for future reference.
• feed.done
  • This doesn't initially exist but is created once some files have been downloaded. It contains a list of the completed files to ensure you don't download the same thing twice. This means you can delete or move the downloaded files once complete without fear of wasting bandwidth re-downloading files.

Now we can simply add the following command to crontab or run it periodically at our leasure to ensure this feed is up to date:

medregator -d ShotOfJaq

This tells Medregator to download any new episodes for ShotOfJaq. You can specify one or more show's directories or if omitted, Medregator will retrieve new episodes of ALL subscribed feeds.

The output of the above command would look something like this:

Last Update: Fri Jun 18 14:43:30 EST 2010
FEED_URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/ShotOfJaq
FEED_TITLE: Shot_Of_Jaq
FEED_DESC: Ten minutes of short, sharp, informed, and funny comment about the open source world
FEED_LINK: http://shotofjaq.org
FEED_ENC_SED: s/mp3$/ogg/
FEED_LANG: en
FEED_COPYRIGHT:
FEED_PUBDATE:
FEED_BUILDDATE: Tue, 29 Jun 2010 17:39:18 +0000
FEED_CATEGORY: http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2
FEED_GENERATOR:
FEED_TTL:

(Resume) Download: 'shotofjaq_theindierevolution.ogg' at 1024K...
Complete: 'shotofjaq_theindierevolution.ogg'
Download: 'shotofjaq_theperfect10hostedwebapps.ogg' at 1024K...
Complete: 'shotofjaq_theperfect10hostedwebapps.ogg'
Download: 'shotofjaq_outwiththeold.ogg' at 1024K...

Here we can also see that one episode hadn't finished downloading so it was resumed. Files are appended with .part whilst they are downloading. Once they have completed, they are renamed correctly and added to the feed.done file.

Download

Download Medregator v0.16
( MD5SUM: dc1065c508369623639e502df9ef95e9 )

User-Agent

Medregator's User-Agent is:

Medregator/VERSION ( KERNELVER; Media Aggregator/PodCatcher - podcast/vidcast retriever; http://www.datapax.com.au/medregator/ )

Where VERSION is the version number and KERNELVER is the Kernel name, eg:

Medregator/0.16 ( Linux; Media Aggregator/PodCatcher - podcast/vidcast retriever; http://www.datapax.com.au/medregator/ )

_{Last updated: 2013-03-13 03:16 UTC}