dantodor / caster

Videocasts browser

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. Run mix phoenix.server

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"}
  ]

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