PowerCasts User Guide v0.21

What's New: add description of VLC support for URLs text-file playback

1. Parse OPML PocketCast exported feed

Run opml_parser_2.py with your downloaded OPML XML filename as argument to build a JSON with every full-text RSS feed and a text file podcasts_opml.txt with all episode URLs:

! python opml_parser_2.py podcasts_opml.xml

! ls -lh podcasts_opml.json podcasts_opml.txt

-rw-r--r-- 1 dd dd 235M Feb 21 10:12 podcasts_opml.json
-rw-r--r-- 1 dd dd 6.5M Feb 21 10:12 podcasts_opml.txt

1.1. Review all episodes text file

! head -n 5 podcasts_opml.txt

https://mcdn.podbean.com/mf/web/25unw3/I_en_forstad_til_m_rket_REMIX.mp3
https://mcdn.podbean.com/mf/web/ptjkia/Hestene_er_Stille_REMIX.mp3
https://mcdn.podbean.com/mf/web/r8f7nx/Farfars_to_liv_REMIX.mp3
https://mcdn.podbean.com/mf/web/yi2emh/21_Roser_afsnit_05_31_07.mp3
https://mcdn.podbean.com/mf/web/6pc4f7/21_Roser_afsnit_04_26_46.mp3

! cat podcasts_opml.txt | wc      # 76.589 episodes

  76589   76589 6794807

1.2. Output newest episodes text file

Run newest.py to output the newest episodes from all feeds:

! python newest.py podcasts_opml.json > newest.txt

1.3. Output HTML links

Run html_parser.py with urls.txt and output.htm arguments:

! ./html_parser.py newest.txt newest.htm

Wrote file newest.htm

2. Playing podcast episodes with VLC Player

The VLC Player supports playback of URLs in a text-file. That means the file with newest episodes newest.txt and all episodes podcast_opml.txt can be played by running VLC with the URL to the file, e.g. the URL to the files in this repo (I recommend adding --random for shuffle playback)

$ vlc --random https://raw.githubusercontent.com/taext/powercasts/master/newest.txt

to playback the newest.txt episodes in random order (shuffle) and

$ vlc --random https://raw.githubusercontent.com/taext/powercasts/master/podcasts_opml.txt

to playback podcasts_opml.txt with all the episodes.

                                        September 12th 2021 by [email protected]