git-annex/doc/tips/downloading_podcasts.mdwn
2014-07-03 14:26:28 -04:00

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You can use git-annex as a podcatcher, to download podcast contents.
No additional software is required, but your git-annex must be built
with the Feeds feature (run `git annex version` to check).
All you need to do is put something like this in a cron job:
`cd somerepo && git annex importfeed http://url/to/podcast http://other/podcast/url`
This downloads the urls, and parses them as RSS, Atom, or RDF feeds.
All enclosures are downloaded and added to the repository, the same as if you
had manually run `git annex addurl` on each of them.
git-annex will avoid downloading a file from a feed if its url has already
been stored in the repository before. So once a file is downloaded,
you can move it around, delete it, `git annex drop` its content, etc,
and it will not be downloaded again by repeated runs of
`git annex importfeed`. Just how a podcatcher should behave.
## templates
To control the filenames used for items downloaded from a feed,
there's a --template option. The default is
`--template='${feedtitle}/${itemtitle}${extension}'`
Other available template variables:
feedauthor, itemauthor, itemsummary, itemdescription, itemrights, itemid,
itempubdate, author, title.
## catching up
To catch up on a feed without downloading its contents,
use `git annex importfeed --relaxed`, and delete the symlinks it creates.
Next time you run `git annex addurl` it will only fetch any new items.
## fast mode
To add a feed without downloading its contents right now,
use `git annex importfeed --fast`. Then you can use `git annex get` as
usual to download the content of an item.
## storing the podcast list in git
You can check the list of podcast urls into git right next to the
files it downloads. Just make a file named feeds and add one podcast url
per line.
Then you can run git-annex on all the feeds:
`xargs git-annex importfeed < feeds`
## distributed podcatching
A nice benefit of using git-annex as a podcatcher is that you can
run `git annex importfeed` on the same url in different clones
of a repository, and `git annex sync` will sync it all up.
## centralized podcatching
You can also have a designated machine which always fetches all podcstas
to local disk and stores them. That way, you can archive podcasts with
time-delayed deletion of upstream content. You can also work around slow
downloads upstream by podcatching to a server with ample bandwidth or work
around a slow local Internet connection by podcatching to your home server
and transferring to your laptop on demand.
## youtube playlists
If your git-annex is also built with quvi support, you can also use
`git annex importfeed` on youtube playlists. It will automatically download
the videos linked to by the playlist.
## metadata
As well as storing the urls for items imported from a feed, git-annex can
store additional [[metadata]], like the author, and itemdescription.
This can then be looked up later, used in [[metadata_driven_views]], etc.
To make all available metadata from the feed be stored:
`git config annex.genmetadata true`