Getting videos offline, automatically, on my phone

There's several video shows that I like to follow: Zero Punctuation and Extra Credits, for example. I like to get the newest episode automatically. Up until a few months ago, I was content to have them pulled into Google Reader, and then to watch them as time permitted. It worked okay, but they would tend to pile up. Sometimes I'd try to watch them on my mobile, but the buffering meant I wouldn't get too many in on a bus ride.

Then I discovered Spool. Spool allows you to record videos and have them downloaded to your phone for later watching. Oh happy day! My pattern then became:

1. Every day, go to Google Reader.
2. Click "Add to Spool" for each video entry.
3. Watch at my leisure.

This past weekend, I realized something. RSS is designed to be automated. (Duh). So I wrote myself a plugin for FlexGet that takes the URL from an RSS feed and sends it off to Spool. Now the videos just show up in My Spool as they are posted!

So yeah, it's available on GitHub: https://github.com/egerlach/flexget-plugins Go ahead and download, fork, and submit Pull Requests. It seems to only work right now if you copy it into the FlexGet main plugins directory... I can't seem to get it to work at ~/.flexget/plugins. That's the next step. (UPDATE: It now works in ~/.flexget/plugins! I just couldn't have it in ~/.flexget/plugins/output is all)

The only problem now is that on Tuesday, YouTube asked Spool to not record their videos and make them available offline. This is annoying, because now the shows I watch from YouTube I can't get offline. I'll just have to write another plugin for that...