So, I really wanted to like Banshee, but sadly it wouldn’t stay running for me reliably and I switched back to Rhythmbox which has been around fora long time. Now, Rhythmbox works well and while it doesn’t have the sync to mobile device feature that caused me a lot of grief in Banshee, I do very much enjoy the stability and also the podcast feature.
For those who don’t know, Ryhytmbox makes it possible to subscribe to podcast feeds and automatically downloads them for you when new material becomes available. It does this for some of my NPR podcast feeds as well as TED Talks.
As you may know, TED Talks come as videos and so I’ve been annoyed by the fact that Rhythmbox will play the audio, but not the video. You can find quite a few places on line where people are griping about this (just goole for “rhythmbox video podcast”). Yeah, it should be pretty easy to put a right click open with item into Rhythmbox, alas it’s not there.
I then thought “Hey, there is a properties menu when I right click on a podcast …”. That opens up a dialog box which shows the original download location and the file name on the ‘Details’ tab. Bingo! Highlight, cut, paste into Totem and watch. Nope. You can select the Source but not the Download Location.
Then I figured out a way to watch the video podcasts in Totem ….
Simple: Open Totem and put the window next to Rhythmbox. Drag the video podcast from Rhythmbox to Totem. Voilà!
Yeah. just drag and drop.
It’s not a great work around, but it does work easy enough.
Cheers.
\@matthias