Consuming Podcasts (virtually anywhere)

Reddit It | Digg This | Add to your: del.icio.us, Google, Yahoo

I just listened to this week's TWiT (fantastic podcast), where they were talking about Blogs, RSS, iPod, Twitter, Podcatchers, etc... That sent me back a few years with my initial experimentation with consuming podcasts. I didn't get an iPod at first, and had a Samsung YEPP YP-T7Z (1GB) mp3 player, which was nice, but I would soon find that it was rather bland.

It felt like the device needed to both be the bucket to hold the mp3 files, but also the mechanism to receive them. ITunes plays on the concept of your "home base," tying up, and tying you to your home computer to receive and update your iPod. It should be that plugging in your media player into ANY computer should auto start the appropriate software to look for and receive new content, for storage back on the device. When you disconnected, your device would be both power and content charged. This is similar to the Windows-on-a-thumbdrive virtualization concept, utilizing the host computers's (PC or Mac, why not?) cpu and bandwidth.

I tried putting some lightweight podcatchers on the device to varying degrees of success, but didn't get anything solid or compelling enough to believe I had it right. I even provided feedback to some of the authors that the software should be runnable from (and to) the player hardware's filesystem.

It ends up the the iPod was vastly superior for listening to podcasts with it's content switching and resume features. ITunes really isn't that bad since I have to charge the iPod each day or so anyway... now my thoughts have turned to trying to connect the iPod (while at work) back to the home PC via a virtual USB connection and LogMeIn.com (which would probably CRAWL so slowly as to be useless).

I wonder if putting a virtual machine (VMware or VPC) on my iPod to be the ITunes "home base" would work. I would want it to run on any PC box I connected it to, and ITunes would have to recognize the iPod as being "plugged in" when it would in fact, be the unmountable "C:" drive. Too bad ITunes is such a heavyweight program. In this scenario, ITunes would use 2x the diskspace necessary to store music/podcasts for consuming on the run. For example, ITunes would download a TWiT episode onto on the C: drive somewhere to have it available... then detecting the the iPod was connected, it would copy the TWiT episode to the iPod (C: drive remember?)... What a colossal waste of space and effort for what MIGHT work, and certainly would be burden/timewaste and disk corruption risk... but it would be fun to try :-)