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Podcasts

Revision as of 03:08, 28 August 2008

There are several programs available to enjoy your podcasts on the go. This page is here to give an overview, as well as some nice features or shortcomings of each program.

Some programs are available via repositories - that way you can update without having do download *.deb files manually every time. Go to Repositories for Nokia N810, N800 and 770 Internet Tablets, choose your tablet's OS version - OS2006, 2007 or 2008 - and have a look at the available repositories.

gPodder

This is the program that most people seem to be using.

Update April 2008: A new version is available that now closely tracks the upstream version of gPodder. More information can be found in this forum post. This version should be updated more regularly and profit from bug fixes in the Desktop gPodder.

Changes compared to the 0.8 Maemo port:

• Better feed parsing (uses feedparser)
• Should start up a bit faster
• Works without online connection (except for downloading of course)
• You can rename podcasts (double-click on the podcast name)
• gPodder now displays info texts and episode website links)
• gPodder also displays file size and release date if you press the ESC key
• gPodder remembers which episodes you have listened to
• Mark episodes as deleted, played, locked (prevent deletion)
• Clean-up functionality to remove old podcast files
• Save single episodes to memory card
• Multiple downloads, download queueing and bandwidth limiting
• More, see gpodder.org/oldnews.html for changes between 0.8 and 0.11.1

gPodder (old 0.8-based version)

This is the Maemo port, forked from a February 2007 version of the upstream gPodder. Get it from the Maemo Garage:

https://garage.maemo.org/projects/gpodder/

Installation Notes for OS2008:

• Notes: 'YOU MUST DO THIS FOR GPODDER TO WORK 'Gpodder would not launch with the gpodder_loader wrapper script that it was using for the icon in the menu, so I edited /usr/share/applications/hildon/gpodder.desktop and changed "Exec=/usr/bin/gpodder_loader" to "Exec=/usr/bin/gpodder" and it works now! Also, you will need to install wget (which also works just fine in OS2008) first as well as python. Wget can be found on the gpodder install link above.

Features:

• You can add podcast feeds and the podcasts then get sorted in their respective podcast list.
• Podcast lists can be selected via drop-down menus.
• The app has 3 horizontal sections: available podcast items, active downloads and downloaded podcasts.
• Downloaded podcasts can be deleted from within gpodder one by one or all at once.

Shortcomings

• Slow: takes forever to start, update channels etc. - uses CPU resources like crazy.
• Inflexible: You can't select download locations or rename streams.
• Inflexible: The latter (renaming streams) would be a very important feature for gpodder, as it names the streams (somehow) after the website it gets them from. If I try to add several different podcasts from (for example) www.tagesschau.de, they all get the same name. Then gpodder only downloads files from the stream first added - although it displays different URLs in the settings...
• Inflexible: gpodder has no way display the text infos sent with the podcasts (overview, info texts).

Screenshot: [[1]]

videocenter

It is available from the Nokia Certified repository, but can also be downloaded from the Maemo Garage:

https://garage.maemo.org/projects/videocenter/

Features:

• You can choose betwen adding podcasts (called Internet videos - although audio podcasts can be added as well), Internet TV (I guess that's streaming media) and Remote video (I guess stuff your media center makes available at home).
• You can add podcast feeds and the podcasts then get sorted in their respecive podcast list.
• Podcasts can be browsed by list in one window with the status (downloaded or not) displayed next to the podcast item's name in the "Internet videos" view.
• Double-clicking on the podcast name displays infos as the complete title, the file's URL and a descrition of the podcast item (if available).
• In the "My videos" view you get a list of the files you already downloaded, odered only by "internal" and "removable" memory card.
• In the "My videos" view the infos again, delete or protect files, rename them and you can move downloaded podcasts to different locations on a file-by-file basis or all of them at once. The "My videos view" also shows you how many percent of your memory card are still available/free.
• You can even select whether to use the "internal" (meaning Maemo's standard) player or an external application.

Shortcomings

• Sometimes videocenter crashes when adding new podcast feeds, for example when adding Netzpolitik.org TV podcast.
• videocenter "thinks" it can only use video podcasts and therefore calls everything "video" - although it works with audio podcasts, as well.

podsync

This is a very new (and still very basic) program, available from

http://wsys.nl/podsync.php

Features

• podsync has a "one window" design: You add postcasts and define (globally) how many of the newest podcasts you'd like to download when refreshing. The window displays the podcast URLs and that's it.
• podsync creates playlists of ALL and only the NEW podcasts in the download directory. These can be used with your favourite video/audio player.
• small, fast, easy

Shortcomings

• Still at a very early stage of development.
• It's very difficult to find the right files in Maemo's file manager to keep/save them, as podsync uses a not-very-distinctive-for-humans naming scheme.