Castget is a simple, command line podcast downloader. It is primarily intended for automatic, unattended downloading of podcasts.

Installation

If you want to install it, first update the list of packages available for ipkg:

Castget depends on a recent version of glib. It is recommended that you update your version of glib, in order to make sure you have the latest one:

Finally you can install castget:

Configuration

Castget is configured through a file named .castgetrc in the user's home directory. This file is organized into sections, one for each podcast you want to download, such as:

[crypto-gram]
url=http://crypto-gram.libsyn.com/rss
spool=/share/hdd/data/podcasts/crypto-gram

Remember to create the appropriate directories to hold the MP3 files for each podcast. If you are using Unslung you can make a directory under /share/hdd/data or share/flash/data, according to your disk layout, and the directory will be easily shared through the built-in samba server. For the above example you should do:

You may also add a global section specifying defaults for all channels:

[*]
id3contenttype=Podcast

The original distribution includes a sample configuration file demonstrating all supported settings, that can be found at /opt/doc/castget/castgetrc.example. You can also see the manual pages for castget and castgetrc.

Running castget from crontab

You can run castget periodically through cron, in order to check for updates for the podcasts channels, adding an entry to the crontab.

If you are running Unslung on an NSLU2, it already has a cron utility. All you need to do is choose a time of the day to run castget and add a line to /etc/crontab like this:

This will run castget daily at 8:00am.

For other firmwares, make sure you have cron installed and add a crontab entry accordingly.