After listening to your last episode, I decided to check out PenguinTV just to see how it compares to BashPodder, especially because of the implied criticism of BashPodder on the PenguinTV homepage. The following comparisons are only from an hour of messing around with PenguinTV and from my experiences with BashPodder using BPConf as a GUI frontend.
Pros:
- Intergrated browser for viewing show notes
It is nice to have access to the show notes to help determine if I would want to download an episode or not. The browser supports images as well as text. Also, any link you click on can be passed to Mozilla Firefox or whatever your default browser for GNOME would happen to be.
- Option to have all feeds marked as viewed
That makes things a bit more convenient than looking through the entries in each feed in BPConf and clicking every single checkbox.
- Status of downloads
It is sometimes helpful to have the actual statistics for how much of a file has downloaded and the estimated time remaining on a download. Also, you can cancel a download in PenguinTV. When I use BashPodder, I have to kill the wget process to cancel a download. This is mostly helpful when a connection is stalled or a download is going so slow that I don't even want to download a file anymore. Neither event happens often but it is a minor pain when it does.
- Easy integration with any media player
You can setup PenguinTV to load the files you downloaded into your favorite media players. The downside to this is that there is no way to seperate which programs handle which types of files. Switching the settings from BMP for playing mp3s to Mplayer for playing videos and then back to BMP is a little hassle even though multiple programs settings can be stored.
Cons:
- Uses a database file to log downloads
Not as easily configurable as text files
- Horrible File Structure
I don't know how the author of PenguinTV can say that BashPodder has a horrible directory structure when the file structure for PenguinTV is far worse. PenguinTV dumps all files from every download session into one directory. The typical grouping of files from separate feeds into their own folders, that most other podcatchers do, would have been the better thing to do if the author didn't like the grouping of files into folders organized by date that BashPodder does. Also, the file is renamed with the particular id that PenguinTV gives the rss item that the enclosure tag is located added to it (ex. 1123825322+0-tllts_96-08-10-05.mp3). I don't want to rename every single file that was downloaded or have to be forced to make a custom playlist so all the mp3 files are in proper order when playing the files on my PSP.
- Can't edit a url for a feed
You can edit the name of the feed in PenguinTV but there is no option to edit the url of a feed. So once the address for a feed changes, you have to delete the feed from your list and then add the feed with the new url to your list. This also means that all the items in the newer feed would be marked as unviewed even if you downloaded every file in every enclosure tag from the previous feed and still have them in your media directory, which could lead you to accidentally download all the files in a feed again.
- Built-in BitTorrent client
I know that most people would see that as a good feature, but I don't. An option to have a torrent file passed to Azureus or BitTornado would have been a lot better; I actually prefer initiating BitTorrent transfers on my own. The BitTorrent interface in PenguinTV is too minimal for me to use. Also, the client stops once you fully download a file so you are never going to seed a file, which kind of goes against the BitTorrent philosophy.
- Does not make a playlist automatically
You can click on the "Play Unviewed Media" button to pass all the file locations to a media player and then save a playlist with those file locations, but it is more of a hassle to do it that way and the playlist would not be portable because the specific locations would be in the playlist instead of the filenames.
- Very Limited Portability
PenguinTV required packages that I had not installed yet on my system. Also, the documentation wasn't very helpful. I had downloaded the remaining dependencies that I didn't already have installed and I was wondering why PenguinTV wouldn't install. It appears that gnome-python-extras was not listed in the documentation so I had to download and install that package before the PenguinTV installer would work. The non-standard dependencies and the fact that there is a true installation process makes PenguinTV far less portable between different Linux systems and virtually non-usable in other operating systems. BPConf wouldn't be portable either, of course, but at least you can load bashpodder.sh, parse_enclosure.xsl, bp.conf, and podcast.log to a usb flash drive, or something similar, and be able to use that on almost any Linux system and then put your BashPodder files back on your main computer later. And the fact that you can use the bash script on other operating systems, with a little work, is cool.
- No filename listed
I don't know how this detail could be overlooked. The only way to find out the filename before a download is complete is if the filename is listed in the show notes. This might not matter most of the time but since the only differences between the TLLTS rss feeds are the files that are in the enclosure tags, it is impossible to tell the two feeds apart with PenguinTV.
- Random issues with different rss feeds
Diggnation: The title of the rss feed would never save. The title kept changing to the title of whichever feed I was browsing previously. In the background, PenguinTV kept giving error messages regarding the & sign in the title and mentioned in the error message that it should be made into & even though that is what is in the title of the Diggnation rss feed. Not very thorough checking I guess
All FeedBurner feeds: Clicking on the "Full Entry" link in the show notes will always lead to the FeedBurner page for the rss feed and not the designated link because PenguinTV doesn't like a question mark placed in a url.
ex. http://feeds.feedburner.com/twit?m=74
This type of thing also happens with blog rss feeds.
There are other problems that I could list but I think that I have mentioned enough. After my experiences with PenguinTV, I still think that BashPodder is the best podcatcher for Linux.
PenguinTV Impressions
Moderators: snarkout, Patrick, dann
