Uwe Hermann | A slightly paranoid Debian developer

Hanno Böck asks which free clients are available for receiving and subscribing to video podcasts, videoblogs, vlogs, vodcasts or whatever you want to call them.

I was asking myself the same question for a number of reasons lately, and here's what I have found:

• Armangil's vodcatcher is a video podcast client for the command line. Written in Ruby, cross-platform, GPL'd, no GUI (obviously).
• PenguinTV, an RSS feed reader which supports podcasts and video blogs. Written in Python, cross-platform, GPL'd, GTK+ GUI.
• kmplayer, proposed by Hanno Böck. Haven't tested it, yet.
• DTV (DemoTV), a "free and open-source platform for internet television and video. An intuitive interface lets users subscribe to channels, watch video, and build a video library". This looks like the most mature client right now (for Mac at least), and it has been ported to Linux just yesterday. It's written in Python, cross-platform, GPL'd, GTK+ GUI. I have filed an ITP and hope to have a Debian package ready in a few days. The DTV Linux code itself is pretty beta, any helping hands with porting would be nice (contact Nick Nassar and/or the devel mailinglist).
• Kitty, a podcast and videocast client for KDE. Written in C++, GPL'd, Qt/KDE GUI.

As for the content, there's lots of videoblogs out there, and I will blog about that in more detail later on. As an appetizer, you can now subscribe to the new (German) Tagesschau Video Podcast (thanks Tim Pritlove).

Update 2005-11-14: Added Kitty.

Here's a bunch of smaller updates which probably don't warrant extra blog posts, but might be interesting nevertheless:

• On the right-hand side of my homepage you now have three new blocks which should simplify site navigation. Each contains a weighted list of tags (tag clouds) for my blog, my podcast, and my photoblog, powered by Drupal's tagadelic module. Of course, the "traditional" navigation menu is still there.
• There's also an RSS feed for comments on this site now, courtesy to Drupal's Comment RSS module.
• On the lower left-hand side of my homepage, there's another new block. It shows where the visitors of my site come from in (almost) realtime. This is a service provided by MapStats (I already talked about it earlier).
• I have uploaded updated versions of my bashrc, vimrc, and muttrc config files.
• My podcast is now listed in iTunes (thanks Daniel Reutter for adding it). You can subscribe by clicking on this button: . The amount of people who subscribe to my podcast have almost doubled, figures went up from 30 subscribers to more than 50 today! If you're reading this and subscribed through iTunes: thanks ;)
• My video iPod will (probably) be shipped on October 31, and it'll take a few more days until it arrives. Arghh, /me wants it now!

If you do a search for "yahoo blog search" on Yahoo Blog Search, you will find out that Yahoo has launched Yahoo Blog Search today. Or something.

They also launched a podcast directory, which lists my music podcast twice for whatever reason.

Looks like Google and Odeo are getting some competition.

(via Steve Rubel)

They certainly do have funny 404 error messages over at odeo.com...

Yesterday, I launched my own podcast (I had threatened to do so earlier). In an unsurpassed effort of creativity I named it Uwe Hermann's Music Podcast ;) This is a pure music podcast (no talking / ranting by me), featuring freely available (mostly Creative Commons licensed) music from various artists and various genres, see my announcement for details.

On the technical side, I have integrated the podcast into my existing website and blog (which is powered by Drupal 4.6.3). The podcasting was possible almost out-of-the-box (as most things are, if you use Drupal). I only applied this small patch which creates an <enclosure> tag for every MP3 to which I link in the respective node. I use the standard "blog" node type to create the podcast entries, put them all in the category "Uwe Hermann's Music Podcast" which I have aliased to http://www.hermann-uwe.de/podcast. The RSS feed for the podcast is simply the standard Drupal feed for that category, which I aliased to http://www.hermann-uwe.de/podcast/rss.xml. Simple, eh?

As I only link to external MP3s that's all I need. If you want to create your own recordings for your podcast, I recommend the audio module by Colin Brumelle of Bryght.

Of course, as I based the podcast on Drupal, you can comment on any podcast "show", refer to them via trackback etc. etc.

I'm eager to hear your opinions, comments and suggestions. Oh, and please feel free to suggest free music which you like. If I like it too, I'll happily play it ;)