Mirror a video RSS feed on a secondary server?
June 11, 2014 9:50 AM Subscribe
I work in an educational environment, and we have a local media server set up to record lectures and then allow them to be watched/downloaded online via podcast-type RSS, but only a limited number can be stored before they're deleted. How can I go about setting up a mirror of this RSS feed that will allow me to store these recordings indefinitely? More details inside.
As it is, there is a publicly available RSS feed for these videos, and my colleagues use this feed with their podcast viewers to download and watch them. The problem is that only the last 10 or so videos are available at any given time, so if you didn't snatch them up they're gone. Right now I've been downloading them all to an external hard drive to make them available to people who want to watch older lectures, but I'd really like to automate this and make it much easier.
I have a self-hosted site through Bluehost and was hoping I could just find a script or something to automatically download new lectures from the public RSS feed, then rehost the videos and regenerate a new self-hosted RSS feed that could be plugged into a podcasting app for access to a larger library.
I've searched around but come up empty. Anyone have experience with something like this?
As it is, there is a publicly available RSS feed for these videos, and my colleagues use this feed with their podcast viewers to download and watch them. The problem is that only the last 10 or so videos are available at any given time, so if you didn't snatch them up they're gone. Right now I've been downloading them all to an external hard drive to make them available to people who want to watch older lectures, but I'd really like to automate this and make it much easier.
I have a self-hosted site through Bluehost and was hoping I could just find a script or something to automatically download new lectures from the public RSS feed, then rehost the videos and regenerate a new self-hosted RSS feed that could be plugged into a podcasting app for access to a larger library.
I've searched around but come up empty. Anyone have experience with something like this?
It sounds kind of unlikely that they're actually being deleted, that could just be the RSS feed's default number of items. If you still want to download all items, you can use something like flexget, which fetch things using RSS as a source.
posted by beerbajay at 10:14 AM on June 11, 2014
posted by beerbajay at 10:14 AM on June 11, 2014
Response by poster: Thanks for the replies. The videos definitely get removed as we're only allocated a limited amount of space on the media server, unfortunately.
posted by sciencemandan at 10:58 AM on June 11, 2014
posted by sciencemandan at 10:58 AM on June 11, 2014
Is this just to serve them up to yourself or to others?
I ask because iTunes will keep any number of old video files, ones downloaded, as long as you tell it to in that feeds settings. Just use these instructions to subscribe to the feed, then click on the feeds options and (famous last words) setting it to keep everything should be obvious from there.
Additionally, podcast apps for phones can do it, too. I use Doggcatcher on Android. For the This American Life feed, which only keeps in episode in the feed at a time, I tell it to keep all of the last 50 files that appear in the TAL feed so I don't miss anything.
posted by Mo Nickels at 4:17 PM on June 11, 2014
I ask because iTunes will keep any number of old video files, ones downloaded, as long as you tell it to in that feeds settings. Just use these instructions to subscribe to the feed, then click on the feeds options and (famous last words) setting it to keep everything should be obvious from there.
Additionally, podcast apps for phones can do it, too. I use Doggcatcher on Android. For the This American Life feed, which only keeps in episode in the feed at a time, I tell it to keep all of the last 50 files that appear in the TAL feed so I don't miss anything.
posted by Mo Nickels at 4:17 PM on June 11, 2014
This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by vasi at 10:11 AM on June 11, 2014