You can use git-annex as a podcatcher, to download podcast contents.
No additional software is required, but your git-annex must be built
with the Feeds feature (run `git annex version` to check).

All you need to do is put something like this in a cron job:

`cd somerepo && git annex importfeed http://url/to/podcast http://other/podcast/url`

This downloads the urls, and parses them as RSS, Atom, or RDF feeds.
All enclosures are downloaded and added to the repository, the same as if you
had manually run `git annex addurl` on each of them.

git-annex will avoid downloading a file from a feed if its url has already
been stored in the repository before. So once a file is downloaded,
you can move it around, delete it, `git annex drop` its content, etc,
and it will not be downloaded again by repeated runs of
`git annex importfeed`. Just how a podcatcher should behave.

## templates

To control the filenames used for items downloaded from a feed,
there's a --template option. The default is
`--template='${feedtitle}/${itemtitle}${extension}'`

Other available template variables:  
feedauthor, itemauthor, itemsummary, itemdescription, itemrights, itemid,
itempubdate, author, title.

## catching up

To catch up on a feed without downloading its contents,
use `git annex importfeed --relaxed`, and delete the symlinks it creates.
Next time you run `git annex addurl` it will only fetch any new items.

## fast mode

To add a feed without downloading its contents right now,
use `git annex importfeed --fast`. Then you can use `git annex get` as
usual to download the content of an item.

## storing the podcast list in git

You can check the list of podcast urls into git right next to the
files it downloads. Just make a file named feeds and add one podcast url
per line.

Then you can run git-annex on all the feeds:

`xargs git-annex importfeed < feeds`

## recreating lost episodes

If for some reason git-annex refuses to download files you are certain are in the podcast, it is quite possible it is because they have already been downloaded. In any case, you can use `--force` to redownload them:

`git-annex importfeed --force http://example.com/feed`

## distributed podcatching

A nice benefit of using git-annex as a podcatcher is that you can
run `git annex importfeed` on the same url in different clones
of a repository, and `git annex sync` will sync it all up.

## centralized podcatching

You can also have a designated machine which always fetches all podcstas
to local disk and stores them. That way, you can archive podcasts with
time-delayed deletion of upstream content. You can also work around slow
downloads upstream by podcatching to a server with ample bandwidth or work
around a slow local Internet connection by podcatching to your home server
and transferring to your laptop on demand.

## youtube playlists

If your git-annex is also built with quvi support, you can also use
`git annex importfeed` on youtube playlists. It will automatically download
the videos linked to by the playlist.

For this you need an rss file containing links to the videos.
For example, this url currently works:
<http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/playlists/PLz8ZG1e9MPlzefklz1Gv79icjywTXycR->

## metadata

As well as storing the urls for items imported from a feed, git-annex can
store additional [[metadata]], like the author, and itemdescription.
This can then be looked up later, used in [[metadata_driven_views]], etc.

To make all available metadata from the feed be stored:
`git config annex.genmetadata true`
