Ok another post to the xbmc forums, this time for podcasting on the xbox media centre.
How come no one it seems has picked up on podcasting for xbmc? If you do not know what podcasting is please read this wikipedia defination – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Podcasting. The basic idea is, that a RSS feed has an enclosure element which points to a location where to download media (typically a Mpeg3 or Torrent file). There are already 100's of podcasts from radio stations to homebrew broadcasters. But theres no douht that its a great resource of media and video wont be that far behind in the near future.
Usually a little program like ipodder or doppler reads the RSS feeds every few hours and collects the content from the enclosure element when it comes across one. I can imagine this being very easy to do as a python script in xbmc, maybe as a background task while you watch films or listen to music not from the internet. Actually I believe ipodder is actually written in python already!!! I've already seen two python scripts which can do pretty much what i've said they just need to be put together. YaRSSr.py and download apleasure_zip.py. Its just a shame i'm not a python programmer…
Seriously if I had the time, I would hack it together myself, I've looked at the source python scripts which I mentioned and I think its possible even for me. Right now I have ipodder running on a machine which dumps all the podcasts media into a shared directory which the xbox reads when loading up, then I'm using the script startplaylist.py to automaticly play a the engadget and daily source code podcasts. Not ideal because I have to add them to the playlist myself, hence why I turned it off and just navigate to the podcats share now. Anyway I hope so one picks up on the idea and takes it somewhere I wasnt even thinking.
