Robin Blandford [ ByteSurgery.com - Digital Media Engineering ]

15/03/06 Building a Podcast Parser & Blueface VoIP

One of the last pieces to fit into the jigsaw of CommentCasting was the creation of a Podcast Parser. Something that would read in XML feeds and pull out all the MP3 files and associated metadata and store them in the MySQL database accessible by the Asterisk Server. I’ve accomplished it today by hacking the SimplePie open source RSS parser, it’s a wonderfully easy API to use. The SimplePie class is now on my server, and outputs the fields I need for each episode of a podcast when the XML URL is given as a $_GET[] variable into the PHP script.

Here’s an example episode output parsed from Tom Raftery’s Pod Leaders live show feed:

Item Title: Todd Cochrane podcast - exclusive!
Item Permalink: http://feeds.feedburner.com/Podleaders?m=56
Item Date: 14 March 2006, 12:00 pm
Item Enclosure: http://feeds.feedburner.com/Podleaders.mp3?d=57
Item Description: Todd Cochrane pod[...]

Each of these episodes will be interspersed with the recorded audio comments in the combined CommentCasting feed that the Asterisk Server will output, all ready for the listeners to subscribe.

Other developments today include communications with Michele at Blacknight about possible collocation of the Asterisk server further down the line, being at a datacentre will provide much greater bandwidth and result in far less dropped packets for the VoIP connection. Keeping the ball rolling, Feargal Brady at Blueface has provided me with details of setting up a nationwide multi-line flatrate PSTN 076 number that would jump to the VoIP network and connect direct to the CommentCasting SIP server.

James Corbett has commented on the logo post suggesting removing the TLA (Three Letter Acronym!) from the tagline, replacing ‘RSS’ with the more generic term ‘feed’. As James points out, it allows the product to move past RSS in the future and he posts the idea of maybe tagging it ‘Audio Feed[back]‘ or ‘Feedback Feeds’.

I’m open to anything that sounds catchy (comment below!).

Tags: CommentCasting, Final Year Project, General

3 Comments

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24/03/06 Ryan Parman

Are there any hacks that you’d like submit to the project as patches? Is there anything that we can do to SimplePie to make this possible without hacking? Please let us know about it at our forums.

If you have a chance to put together a tutorial of sorts, I’d love to link to it from the SimplePie website.

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24/03/06 Robin Blandford

Hey Ryan… I added a couple of new fields alright. I’m going to make sure your logo & a link is included on the project page.

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26/03/06 Ryan Parman

Thanks! We really appreciate your interest!

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