Save on your bandwidth bill - podcast download link rotator

[manatee]

I just made a program that rotates through a list of podcast download URL's and it worked perfectly. To anyone interested in saving on bandwidth, read on.

Normally, when you download the latest episode of a podcast from iTunes, etc. - everyone will be downloading from one location. With this program your RSS feed will rotate the acutal download location from as many mirror locations as you would like. I have tested it in iTunes and Blogmatrix Sparks and it worked perfectly.

Try it yourself. This is a simple demo podcast with 4 mirror locations.

Try subscribing in iTunes or whatever software you use. I'd be curious if it works with any other podcast applications..

Podcast Feed URL:

http://www.atomicscripts.com/savebandwidth.xml

With this feed the bandwidth is distributed among all mirror locations. If you could find enough places to host each feed, you might be able to significantly reduce your bandwidth bill or have no bandwidth bill at all.

If you would like more info on this program, have any questions or suggestions email me at manateemedia@gmail.com , pm me, etc.

Enjoy!

[docsnavely]

it's a good idea, but i wouldn't fo it myself.....

only because the stats would be majorly f'd up. at least that's how i see it. great idea though for those not on libsyn, but with a couple different hosts.....

[manatee]

Actually, since anyone downloading will first go to the CGI script, I currently have it logging some simple stats to a log file. I'm going to add more later, but for now it logs IP address, which download location it got the mp3 file from (1-4), and what client they used (itunes, ipodder, etc.) Sample log file:

1|70.179.240.75|iPodder/2.1 +http://ipodder.sf.net/
2|70.179.240.75|iTunes/4.9 (Windows; N)
3|70.179.240.75|Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0

very basic for now, but I think I will create a program that has an admin interface, graphics, etc. Hopefully my feed will be in itunes soon so I can how it works with others downloading. I have a feeling it takes longer for your podcast to get in itunes when you have artwork for your podcast. It would make sense... they probably have to manually approve podcasts with images... otherwise itunes might be full of offensive images.