Let's Get LIT

Posted on Friday, Nov 18, 2022 by RastaCalavera | Series: Podcasting 2.0 | Podcasting 2.0, Podcast Namespace, Enhancements, Features

I have been loving the Live notifications from Podverse that let you know when a podcast you follow is doing a live stream. The only show that supports it currently that I listen to is the Podcasting 2.0 Show but I think more content creators will support it in the future. I think it is a bit burdensome to wrap your head around it, but I think I have figured out the basic steps.

Going LIT

• Get a server that will allow you to broadcast a live stream
  • There is probably an easier approach but I’ve chosen the self hosted option and am using Azuracast as the software stack to make this possible.
• Get software that will allow you to send audio to your live stream server
  • I have chosen to use MIXXX because it came pre-installed on my system and it seems pretty straight forward to use.
• Add the LIT tag to the RSS
  • I am not sure if this is done at the individual episode level or further in the chain, still need to figure this one out.
  • It appears that this needs to live outside of the item tag so this would have to be something that is in the default params of the theme.
• Publish RSS with the updated LIT tag and send off a Podping to update the index.
  • I am still learning about Podping but I believe that this is the mechanism that can quickly update the Podcast Index which will then trickle down to the apps to let listeners know that your podcast is live.

Coding

I have a tinker branch of my site where I kind of test different things out.

So I’ve added these pieces below into the episode.rss.xml of Castanet

    <podcast:liveItem> status={{ .Site.Params.show_live_status }} start="{{ .Site.Params.show_live_start }}" end="{{ .Site.Params.show_live_end }}"
      <title>Linux Lemming Live Stream</title>
      <enclosure url="https://cautiouslycurious.com/listen/linux_lemming/radio.mp3" type= "audio/mpeg" length="16000" />
      <podcast:contentLink href="https://cautiouslycurious.com/listen/linux_lemming/radio.mp3">Listen Live!</podcast:contentLink> 
    </podcast:liveItem>

I don’t have a GUID in there which might be an issue. . . not entirely sure. I also had to kind of guess on the length for the enclosure because Azuracast is streaming at 128kbps so I used a converter to get it into bytes.

In the config.toml of the site I also added these params that could be called by the rss generator:

show_live_status = "\"ended\"" #pending/live/ended
show_live_start = "2022-11-22T20:30:00-06:00" #need to convert, https://dencode.com/en/date/iso8601
show_live_end = "2022-11-22T22:00:00-06:00" #need to convert, https://dencode.com/en/date/iso8601

I had to use a date converter to get a ISO8601 Date that seemed to match the required format.

These all seemed to checkout so I added them into the main branch of the project without doing a PR. I didn’t want to re-learn how to cherry pick a commit and it was just easier to copy and paste things over after I knew it wouldn’t break it.

So in theory, I should be good to go! Once I get all the streaming stuff connected, I fire off a python script to notify podping and then a notification should go out to apps. Maybe I’ll try getting LIT this week!