Contents 1 Motivation 2 Background 3 Internal Details 4 Installation 5 Examples

Motivation Edit

This hack provides a solution for the following situation:

• MPD should play the most recent entry in a podcast, OR
• MPD should play a web-radio stream according to an online playlist (m3u/pls/asx)
• MPD should play a LastFM radio station (via LastFM-Proxy)

with the condition that the MPD playlist itself must stay static.

Background Edit

My MPD server runs on a small ARM system (NSLU2 or QNAP TS109), and in a static MPD playlist a number of web-radio stations and podcasts are assigned to individual buttons on my IR remote-control. Now with pressing the button for a certain news podcast I want to hear the most current issue of that stream.

Internal Details Edit

The podcast-bounce script implements a HTTP service for xinetd and requires the URL of the podcast or playlist as a GET parameter 'feed'. It then downloads that podcast or playlist file in the background, extracts the top-most audio URL and redirects the HTTP request to that URL via a '302 Found' response.

Installation Edit

Open the web-interface to the devbase repository at

http://devbase.homelinux.org:5071/viewvc/embedded/scripts/podcast-bounce/

and proceed according to the installation instructions in the file 'INSTALL'.

Examples Edit

Assuming the podcast-bounce service runs on a machine called 'slug' on port 8082, you can enter the following URL in MPD or any other media player to listen to the most recent edition of

• NPR's Car Talk:

http://slug:8082/?feed=http://www.npr.org/rss/podcast.php%3Fid=510208

• News From Lake Wobegon:

http://slug:8082/?feed=http://americanpublicmedia.publicradio.org/podcasts/xml/prairie_home_companion/news_from_lake_wobegon.xml

• BBC's Global News:

http://slug:8082/?feed=http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/worldservice/globalnews/rss.xml

• ...

or you can listen to Internet radio stations like Digitally Imported or Frisky Radio or to different LastFM radio streams by providing the following URLs:

• Digitally Imported - Lounge

http://slug:8082/?feed=http://www.di.fm/mp3/lounge.pls

• Frisky Radio:

http://slug:8082/?feed=http://www.friskyradio.com/frisky.m3u

• LastFM station tagged "Jazz" (LastFM-Proxy is required)

http://slug:8082/?feed=http://slug:1881/globaltags/jazz.m3u

Note that any special characters (like '?' or '&') in the feed's URL have to be encoded, eg. by an online converter like http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/dencoder/