Caster

What is Caster?

I find watching technical videos a good way to learn. I wanted a way to have one place where I could manage all these videos, and a place to keep notes on what I've watched. I also wanted an excuse to play a bit with Elixir & Phoenix & Vuejs ;)

Caster has built-in support for Vimcasts and custom youtube/vimeo files (using youtube-dl). Videos are downloaded locally, and then viewed using vlc. There's a simple modal for taking notes on what you're learning.

Installation

Prerequisites

1. You need to have Elixir installed.
2. You need to have youtube-dl installed
3. You need to have a node environment setup.
4. You need to have a database (I use postgres)
5. You need to have vlc available on your path.
6. Probably some other things ;) (send a PR to update the docs)

Setup

1. Clone this repo somewhere.
2. $ mix deps.get
3. $ npm install
4. Before moving on, configure your database in config/dev.exs and run: $ mix ecto.create $ mix ecto.migrate
5. $ npm run build-js
6. $ npm run build-scss
7. $ npm run build-assets
8. cp config/dev.secret.exs.sample to config/dev.secret.exs or remove it, and comment out the include line in config/dev.exs
9. Run mix phoenix.server

Notes

Please note, steps 5-7 should only be necessary the first time you start up the app. I haven't worked out how to force the app to create the various directories on the fly.

Configration

You can configure a few things at the moment, PR's definitely welcome for any RSS feeds out there. In your config/dev.secret.exs there are a few settings you can do. Here's a sample

config :caster,
  notes_export_file: "~/somedir/notes_file.md",
  video_export_directory: "~/Desktop/interesting_videos"

config :caster, Caster.Sources,
  local_folders: [
    %{source: :some_other_casts,
      directory: "/path-to-caster/caster/priv/downloads/foobar",
      removeable: false,
      order: [desc: :title],
      title: "FooBar",
      wildcard_match: "**/*.mov"}
  ]
  

#### Note for sync'ing local content.

If you do have local content, once you have added it to the `local_folders` config above, you need to pull the content into the database. Currently there isn't a mix task (laziness), but you can run the task with:

1. iex -S mix phoenix.server
2. Caster.LocalFolderCast.import!

It will then go look through all the folders and pull in the video's based on the wildcard match.

1. notes_export_file is a file which any notes you make will be concatenated into.
2. video_export_directory is a directory where videos (marked interesting) can be copied to. Why would you bother? Well, it was handy for me to mark a few videos as interesting and then copy them off onto a phone / tablet / whatever to have handy.
3. local_folders just contain an array of structs that you can use to point to folders which contain videos you have already downloaded from somewhere.

TODO / Pull Requests

1. Adding different feeds (e.g. Ruby Tapas)
2. Ability to archive casts.
3. Other cool stuff ;)

Sample

Contributing

1. Fork it
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create new Pull Request

License

Released under the MIT license.

Copyright, 2017, by Patrick Davey.

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.