About PenguinTV
PenguinTV is not just another RSS feed reader. It is designed
from
the ground up to work seamlessly with podcasts and video blogs,
allowing you to easily enjoy the audio, music, and video published
around the web in RSS format. One user calls it "hands
down the app of choice" for downloading video blogs.
Until it was written, the only solutions for listening to podcasts on
Linux
were clunky apps and unreliable bash scripts. Many solutions
required the user to browse file directories named by date to find media
files. With the large amount of information in podcasts and videos, a
user needs help to keep track of everything.
PenguinTV eliminates all of these problems with a light-weight
but
powerful interface that shows you what you need to know, and hides what
you don't. You can immediately see what you've watched, what's
available to view, and which media are downloading. You don't have to
worry about where files are stored, what their names are, or what
format they are in.
Even if you don't listen to podcasts, PenguinTV is an excellent RSS reader for
pure-text feeds, with search capability, filtering, and organizational tools.
Given the number of poorly-formed RSS feeds out there, it's important
that a feed-reading application be able to deal with any problems that might come up.
PenguinTV makes use of the famous feedparser module to do the heavy lifting
of interpretting RSS feeds, but it also has and extensive set of battle-tested
exception checking and handling. If there's a feed that does something unusual,
PenguinTV has seen it and accounted for it
Supported Features:
- One-button downloading of new videos and podcasts
- Integrated media player based on GStreamer.
- Integrated search with context highlighting
- BitTorrent support
- Tagging categorization, no ugly trees
- Works well with two feeds or two hundred
- Multiple window layouts, including two-pane "Planet" style,
classic, widescreen, and vertical style
- Sync media to external folders or USB devices
- Support for OPML subscription files
- Auto-tuning polling, so that PenguinTV only polls
feeds as often as they update
- Powered by Mark Pilgrim's famous feedparser
- Support for Apple iTunes podcast links
Shoulders of Giants
I owe a debt to Marco Gritti, Mark Pilgrim, the Straw
project, and other Open Source projects
I studied in order to write this application.
Latest News
I think it's safe to say that I'm done implementing large features in PenguinTV. I will keep
the code up to date as long as I can, so when APIs change PenguinTV should continue to work.
Download
Changes in 4.5
- Platform Updates, including Webkit support, AppIndicator support, and updated NetworkManager support
- Better right-click menus
- Better detection of enclosures
- The usual number of bug fixes
Changes in 4.1
- Many API and Python language fixes and updates
- Add support for multimedia keys and remotes
Changes in 4.0
- Lots of bugfixes, perfomance improvements, etc
- Supports Nokia N800/N810 Maemo devices
- Better setup of mozilla environment, should no longer crash
on startup on any platform
- Commandline control of media player
- Local image caching so images still appear when offline
Changes in 3.4
- Listen to NetworkManager for offline / online changes
- UI fixes based on user feedback
- Better ajax
- New "keep new" feature to permanently keep an entry unread
for later reading
- Right click support inside Planet View -- just right click
on an entry and options will appear
- Nice UI touches, including progress bars and icons for
downloaded media
- New "mark everything viewed" option for catching up
- Better database indexes, speeding up performance
- Initial Maemo support
- New available backend for search -- Xapian
- No more support for gtkhtml -- only mozilla embedding (when
webkit is mature, support will be added)
- Properly set up mozilla environment -- should prevent
crashes on startup
Changes in 3.0
Changes in 2.95
- Add support for phobos.apple.com links
- Detect and configure proxy settings based on gconf or moz
- periodically save playlist to improve crash-only-ish
behavior
- fix bug in first-poll marking
- support ftp downloads correctly
- fewer errors on first-run
Changes in 2.91
Changes in 2.90
- New tray icon with notifications
- New tag editor
- Muchos Fixes
Changes in 2.85
- Discovered workarounds for Mozilla crashes in Ubuntu and
Fedora
- Created Packages
Changes in 2.80
- if OPML file contains categories (folders), convert them to
tags
- introduced auto-deletor, so old viewed media is cleared out
to make room for new downloads
- fix search db to reindex properly
- fixed CSS so images don't overflow out of borders anymore
- started using gsignals more intelligently, improving
responsivness.
- pushing stop in gstreamerplayer finally releases xv port
Changes in 2.56
- Many fixes for OLPC (not visible here)
- Other small fixes
Changes in 2.5.1
- Fixed big tag dataloss bug. Please upgrade
Changes in 2.5
- Optional integrated media player based on GStreamer.
- Search support based on Lucene
- Support for Mozilla rendering
- New two-pane "Planet-Style" layout
- New download window which lists all the files currently
downloading
- Optional fancier display of feed list, including feed icons
- Better tag organization, including favorite tags and tag
searching
Changes in 2.0.3
- Fixed a small installation problem with the translation
files.
Changes in 2.0.2
- fixed problem with database upgrade scheme
- fix for liferea opml folders
- swedish fix
Changes in 2.0
- fixed small issues with feed detections
- fixed highlighting problem with the Tag Editor
Changes in 1.93
- fixed issue with enclosures disappearing from items
- fixed tricky bug where "download and play" didn't mark
feeds as read
- fixed a race condition that seems to affect dual core
machines
- tweak default subs to use gnomefiles free software-only feed
Changes in 1.92
- Fixed problems with Ask A Ninja
- Fixed problems with gnomefiles feed detection
- Other small fixes
Changes in 1.91
- Brown bag fix for silly error
Changes in 1.90
- supports http authentication
- Much faster importing of OPML files
- Much faster initial startup with many feeds
- many fixes
Changes in 1.75
- Bugfixes for the 1.70 series
Changes in 1.71
- Massive UI responsiveness work.
- Progress bar at window bottom for feed polling, downloads,
and
other lengthy operations.
- Quitting the program now stops polling
- New database schema
Dependencies
PenguinTV requires a relatively large number of python
libraries.
Many of them come standard with distributions, but some must
unfortunately be
downloaded separately. One of my goals in 3.0 will be to
reduce the number of dependencies.
- Pysqlite
version 2.5
or higher
- PyCurl
- python-xml
- python mozilla support (on ubuntu, python-gnome2-extras
package; on fedora, gnome-python2-extras)
- gnome bindings, including gconf, glade, and gnomevfs
- python-xapian for search support
- python gstreamer for media player
Get Involved
PenguinTV is housed at SourceForge.
The project page is here.
I could
use a lot of help with distribution packages and translations.
