Mon, 17 Nov 2008
Podcast Timings Metadata
As I mentioned yesterday, one of the podcasts that I listen to regularly is Filmspotting. Now, I've listened to Filmspotting for a long time and, as such, have come to trust their recommendations and reviews. Unfortunately, as they are based in the US, they often review films that I have no way of seeing for some time. Or, perhaps, it's a marathon film that I haven't managed to get a hold of. Either way, if I later catch up with the film, I like to go back and listen to the Filmspotting review again.
Now, this is somewhat irritating. I have to find the episode in which the film was reviewed (which normally involves Google), then download that episode, then scan through looking for the review, then skip on to something else when the review is finished. This is made somewhat easier by the Filmspotting guys, as they publish timings of each show in the show notes. However, it's still more effort than it should be.
On a number of occasions, when trying to conserve space on my MP3 player or something along those lines, I've downloaded the episode in question and then used mp3splt to get only the part of the show I'm interested in.
Having done this a couple of times, it occurred to me that this should be easily automatable, if not done by the podcast provider themself. If each episode in the podcast feed included its timing information as part of its metadata, then this would be much easier. This would presumably imply using Atom rather than RSS, but that's the way things should be moving anyway, as it's a superior format.
So, is this already done? If not, are there good reasons why not?
If it isn't, and there aren't, I think I should look into how I can take this further, because I don't really have enough things to do in my spare time as it is.
Posted: Mon, 17 Nov 2008 20:05 | | Comments: 2