How to get Podcasts automatically to your XBMC live box
#1
I eradicated all Windows Media centers from my home and installed XBMC live on them this weekend.

One of the things I am doing with the XBMC Live that I could not easily do with the Windows variety is to automatically grab all my favorite HD video podcasts from REvision3.

Step 1 log in.
Step 2 sudo apt-get install wget
Step 2.5 sudo apt-get install cron
Step 3 get bashpodder onto your XBMC live box... I used wget and from my mac that I ssh'd into the XBMC box with copied and pasted the URL's from bashpodder's website. http://www.lincgeek.org/bashpodder/ You need to download the items they say you need. This may change, so I'm not repeating those instructions here.

After all that you modify the bp.conf to hold the RSS feed addresses of the Feeds you want. http://revision3.com/ is one of the very few that have HD podcast feeds. most other podcasters are not HD yet.

After you get that done, I created a folder on my XBMC live's hard drive to hold the podcasts, I have a 250 gig drive so I'll have plenty of room. I modified the bashpodder script by adding the following to the END of it.

mv $datadir/*.divx /media/sdb1/PODCASTS
mv $datadir*.mp4 /media/sdb1/PODCASTS
rm -rf $datadir

That moves my new podcasts (I only download divx and mp4 right now) to the podcasts directory and blows out the download directory and any left over cruft like mp3's and jpg's that may be in the RSS stream.

finally I add the following to the crontab by using crontab -e

/home/xbmc/bashpodder.shell 1> /dev/null


I now have automatic retrieval of all my favorite shows that SHOULD BE ON the R4 channel but the morons a Comcast think watching some doofus playing a video game is better. Oops sorry, I ranted AngryRofl

you can expand this easily to grab mp3's and move them to your music podcasts directory, as well. I am also researching on adding bittorrent to grab some of the other podcasts that are distributed via torrent.

There's a good start getting instant free "tv" into your XBMC. yes it's mostly geeky stuff, but there is some sports and other video podcasts that are of interest, only low res, I'm still searching for more HD podcasts.

This is from my memory of what I did last night. I may be slightly wron on symantics like the $ in the script pointing to the directory. CHECK YOUR WORK BEFORE EXECUTING there is a DANGEROUS command "rm -rf" in there that can delete your whole machine if used wrong. I run from the xbmc directory to eliminate the need to sudo on most operations and make things safer.
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How to get Podcasts automatically to your XBMC live box0