podcast

Podcasts

You can add podcast stream urls in the My Stuff sub-option My Podcasts. Most valid podcast stream urls will be in xml format, eg. http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/series/guardiandaily/podcast.xml . Other valid formats are similar to: http://www.npr.org/rss/podcast.php?id=510221 .
Such streams urls should give you the ability to listen to the latest edition of the podcast. Podcasts are streamed directly from the broadcasters website unlike an Ipod or other MP3 player which will physically download a podcast to it's hard drive for playing later.

Podcast urls are interpreted by so-called backend processes at Reciva - this means that Podcasts are dependent on the Reciva database server system - in the unlikely event that the servers are unreachable, then you will not be able to access your podcasts.

Why can't I pause podcasts?

The pause/resume facility available on (BBC) On Demand content is, I think, due to a convenient facility at the BBC server.

Such a facility does not exist with all podcast servers - i.e. to request that transmissions starts from a given point within a file.

While it might be possible for Reciva to implement a temporary pause, it is probably not be feasible to do a long one.

A suggestion made to Reciva was that the radio could use the USB disk (where present) or the home LAN (if it has write access) to spool the content when the user requests a pause. Then it could resume from the saved version. It would then be possible to suspend/resume much like it can do with the local media player.

This would need external external storage ... because there is not enough spare memory within the radio itself to store a large podcast.

- To Do
Add information about podcast XML, Server parsing, My Podcasts, perhaps also Blogspot Radio