Thursday 1 October 2009

Aggregating Vodcasts on KDE4

OK, so this is a really geeky post, so if you're not in the slightest interested stop reading now...

So I'm quite into the concept of vodcasting (Video-Podcast). Getting new episodes of a "programme" as and when they are released and automatically downloading them. For a while a year or more back I was using a program called Miro which was fantastic, but sucked the life out of my computer...

More recently I was using a combination of hpodder and reencode to download and encode the vodcasts for my GP2X and then watching them on the train to work. When I stopped taking the train, I stopped keeping up-to-date with the "channels" I was following.

I finally have my dream set-up in my office: 1 computer, 1 laptop, 1 keyboard, 1 mouse and 2 screens - all thanks to a KVM... woop!

Anyway, my computer has Kubuntu 9.04 (64bit) and KDE4 on it. Love it! Had a few teething problems with the network managers, but eventually found WICD (pronounced "wicked") which works perfectly! Also had some dodgy graphics and some issues with the dual screen, but that is all sorted now.

Anyway, thought I'd get a vodcast aggregator now that I have my own computer again (Lucy also has a computer in the back room, so at the moment there are 3 computers on... ooops). The question is, what should I go for?

I thought about Miro, but when I went to install it, saw a whole load of gnome packages, which I wasn't really into. So I had a look around and found a KDE compatible equivalent... Kitty. To be honest, Kitty looks like it hasn't been developed for a couple of years. With just a few tweaks it could be really nice, but it was just too naff for me. It doesn't automatically download new episiodes and it doesn't tell you what you've watched.

I did think about just using my hpodder/reencode combination, but this would have the same drawback (although I could cron it to run regularly, there would be no way of seeing what I had watched).

So it's Miro after all. I like the way it has a great guide full of other shows. I like the fact that it automatically downloads new episodes. I love the fact that once you've watched it it gives you 7 days and then deletes the old videos unless you select to keep them. It's brilliantly thought out and I love it! Such a shame it's Gnome, but nevermind.

So, in summary, Miro is much better than Kitty.

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