[Rhythmbox-devel] External podcasts

[Dave Martin <david airgeadstudio net>]

Folks

I have been playing round with the code working out the best way to get 
rhythmbox to handle externally downloaded podcasts. I have come up with 
two approaches that look like they should work but I am not sure which 
one would be best.

Option 1 is to hook into the ryhthmdb monitoring functions. That would 
involve adding the podcast download location to the list of monitored 
directories which is simple enough. The problem is that it looks like it 
will be a lot of work to process the change events correctly for 
podcasts - the whole monitoring thing assumes that everything being 
monitored is a song so teaching it to distinguish between songs and 
podcasts would be a fair bit of work. I'd also need some input from 
someone who knows that part of the code better as I can't work out where 
events are pulled off the event queue and processed. I'd probably need 
to add a new event type to allow the event processor to know whether its 
a song or podcast. The advantage of this is that its a very simple UI. 
Essentially there is no change to the existing UI and any files placed 
in the podcast download location would automagically appear.

The other option is to hook into the podcast handler's periodic update 
mechanism. Essentially you would add podcasts as normal through the UI 
but rather than specifying a URL do download from you would specify a 
local directory to import from. Possibly it would need an "external 
podcast' checkbox to distinguish it from a podcast handles by rhythmbox. 
During the periodic update that the podcast handler does, for podcasts 
with the external flag set (or a local directory instead of a URL) it 
would check for new files in the directory instead of downloading new 
episodes then add them to the list as normal. This would be less work 
than approach 1 and is integrated into the podcast component which makes 
sense but would mean that the user would have to configure each podcast 
in RB as well as in their external downloader. Possibly an import 
function could be added to help with this. Another problem is that it 
would only find new episodes when the updater runs (every hour by 
default) rather than them appearing as soon as they appear on the 
filesystem.

Any suggestions on which approach is best from the gurus out there? I'm 
tending towards option 2 but mostly because its less work and I can see 
how to do it all (which appeals to my innate laziness).

Cheers
Dave