tinycast

Automatically compress podcasts to tiny file sizes for bandwidth constrained connections like cellular or satellite.

Use Case

Sometimes I'm in locations where Internet connectivity is weak or expensive, but I'd still like to listen to the latest episode of my favorite podcasts. Podcasts can be pretty large files to download (50-100 MiB), but if you are willing to reduce the quality they can be much smaller to download (2-10 MiB).

Instead of downloading the episode to my server in a fast connection, manually compressing the file and copying it over, I wanted a way to download the files in a regular podcast app, right on my phone.

Conversion

This service takes a podcast feed and changes the links to podcasts downloads to point to the service. When a podcast file is requested, the service transcodes the audio file on the fly (without storing it locally first) and streams the much smaller file to the client.

Screenshots

Deployment

Docker

An example Dockerfile.

docker run -d \
  --name=tinycast \
  -e PORT=8082 \
  -e BASE_URL="http://example.com:8082/" \
  -p 8082:8082 \
  --restart unless-stopped \
  sholiday/tinycast

Docker Compose

An example docker-compose.yml.

---
version: "3"
services:
  tinycast:
    image: sholiday/tinycast:latest
    restart: unless-stopped
    environment:
      - BASE_URL=https://tinycast.example.com/
      - API_KEY=AUniqueStringForTheDeployment