Bobcat allows you to ceate a podcast feed from your BBC Sounds subscriptions.

Bobcat runs in a Docker container and uploads podcast files to an Amazon S3 Bucket.

You can find it here on Docker Hub.

Here is how the feed looks in Apple Podcasts and Overcast.

The podcast feed is created as follows:

• A headless Chrome browser is launched.
• The browser logs in to the BBC Website using provided account details.
• A list of episodes is retrieved from the My Sounds page.
• The audio for any episodes not already in the S3 bucket are downloaded using youtube-dl, coverted to 128k CBR MP3 files with ffmpeg and then uploaded to the bucket.
• A podcast.xml feed file is created and uploaded.
• Optionally, Overcast servers are pinged when the feed changes.

The update process is run when the container is started and then every three hours throughout the day.

The feed will contain the most recent episodes found across all shows. As Bobcat stores episodes it has seen in a SQLite database, entries may remain in the feed after they have been removed from the BBC Sounds website.

The feed contains an <itunes:block> element and so should be treated as a private feed by Podcast players.

Bobcat tidies the S3 bucket it uses, removing any files that are no longer part of the podcast feels. This means the bucket used by Bobcat should not be used for any other purpose as any unregonised files will be permanently deleted.

The account used to access the bucket needs the following permissions:

• s3:PutObject
• s3:GetObject
• s3:ListBucket
• s3:DeleteObject
• s3:PutObjectAcl

If the bucket used is called s3-bucket-name then the podcast feel will be available at https://s3-bucket-name.s3.amazonaws.com/podcast.xml.

The Environment Variables used by the Docker container are as follows:

The significant volumes in the Docker container are as follows:

If you would like to use a different Logo image for the feed, simply upload your own logo.png in to the S3 Bucket. It will not get overwritten when the feed updates.