Podcaster

Podcaster is a command line podcast player. It uses mpv as media player.

How it works:

• read podcast RSS feeds from ~/.config/podcaster.conf
• parse them using the feedparser library
• user selects podcast and episode using a curses interface
• extract audio file URL via youtube-dl
• play via python-mpv

For a more versatile and feature-complete program, check out podcast-player or castero.

Requirements

• python, version 3.6 or later
• pip as package manager for Python
• Python packages are automatically installed via setup.py
• libmpv must be available for python-mpv to work
• notify-send must be available for error notifications

Debian/Ubuntu:

• apt install python3 python3-pip libmpv1 libnotify-bin

Installation

git clone [this repository]
cd podcaster/
pip install .

Usage

Add URLs to RSS feeds of your favourite podcasts to ~/.config/podcaster.conf like this (comments and blank lines are optional):

# Python-specific
https://realpython.com/podcasts/rpp/feed
http://feeds.soundcloud.com/users/soundcloud:users:82237854/sounds.rss  # import this

# AI
https://lexfridman.com/category/ai/feed/

# General
https://feeds.simplecast.com/XA_851k3  # stack overflow podcast

Then use podcaster from the terminal.

Keybindings

• Selection menu

  • up, down, j, k: navigation
  • return, right, l: select
  • escape, left, h: back
  • q: quit

• Audio player

  • left, right, h, l: forward/backward seek
  • space, p: pause
  • up, down, j, k: volume up/down
  • [, ]: playback speed up/down
  • espace, q: quit

Screenshots

Fetching...

Select podcast

Select episode

Play episode

Details

• Should work on any Linux system, tested on Ubuntu 20.04
• Might work on Windows, besides the desktop notification (this might be useful)
• The podcast list file is specified in config.py
• The curses interface is not very elaborate and quite fragile. I might fix that later. Pull requests are welcome