Downloading podcasts on a QNAP nas, the hard way

For a long time I have had this quite unique way to download podcasts on my home network. It’s served me very well but since getting the NAS it’s been an endless fight to find a good way to do the same with minimal effort. Up till recently I have been running another machine on my network with Ubuntu, to download the podcasts using the tiny tiny rss source.

I would sync the podcasts over the network to my NAS mainly for connivance but I like the idea of the NAS being the place to access everything.

So after many years I finally come to a solution which might be useful to others too, as I couldn’t find a good solution in one place. To be fair I stopped running Tiny Tiny RSS (TTRSS) in favour of FreshRSS but regardless.

These are all for informational purposes and aimed at technical people who understand their way around a the terminal, have sudo and SSH access and can use alternative app repos.

1. Install CrontabUI and Entware-std on your QNAP using the linked repo.
2. I tried using CastGet which you can install via OPKG store but couldn’t get to grips with it, as it didn’t support what Podget did.
3. I downloaded and unzipped Podget then ran it from the terminal. It worked once I found the user directory /share/homes/{username}
4. Then I started moving the download directory and where the config files sat by modifying the permissions.
5. Once it was working, I created a shell script which would pull the downloads and have all the parameters set. Remembering to make it executable checked it can work under a admin user
6. Then started on the Qnap cron, which is a pain and needs attention. This is also where CrontabUI can save you a lot of time. I did do it manually but found it tiresome and there was little feedback.
7. In CrontabUI, I tried a number of different options and would check they would run, looking at the timestamps of files. In the end what work ed for me was, /sbin/download-podcasts.sh. I tried many times to get it working but found it wouldn’t actually run outside of /sbin even with the right execute permissions.
8. Now it works but may reconsider switching to Castget now I stopped using TTRSS and I have found I need to use Podget 0.6 as it throws a lot of errors from missing libraries and out of date fgrep commands.

Hopefully this might be useful to others? There might be an update if I switch back to Castget.