The Sect of Rama

Now that Sun employees have a convenient way to share multimedia files via their blogs' RSS feeds, it was time again to look at what was available to consume these streams. ipodder.org has a Windoze client, which works fine if you happen to run that on your desktop, but I was more interested in TTY based clients that would run on *nix platforms. Enter perlpodder.

As evidence of how simple consuming a cast can be, the perlpodder script is just over 200 lines (not including optional user prefs- and in four short steps (on my box anyway), you'll have more audio than you can shake an amplifier at:

perl -MCPAN -e "install XML::DOM"

wget http://unc.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/perlpodder/perlpodder.tar.gz

gzip -dc perlpodder.tar.gz | tar xf -

./perlpodder.pl

Not that I recommend that- you'll end up with nearly 1.5GB(!) of data in /tmp if you run it in its default state, but that's how easy it can be.

Now all we need are a few bold Sun employees to pioneer the effort on Mediacast! Perhaps we'll have to run blog posts through a voice synth like this (thanks AT&T Labs for the cool synth.)

Simply add my RSS feed to your favorite client, and let it do the heavy lifting.