Dealing with the steep costs of internet services in my country and being an avid podcast listener myself, me and a couple of friends came up with a solution. We developed a website that works as a mirror for users' selected podcast feeds and converts the episodes into opus format, slashing the mobile data consumption that's a real concern for internet access here: https://easypodcasts.live

It's FOSS and free as in beer.

Wow I like this idea at least for many conversation based podcasts. I try to download mine at home but data isn't as expensive for the times I don't. Still there are reasons to use this.

I need to look into how the mirroring works, for some time I have wanted a way to subscribe to a podcast with a timeshifted start. Say from the beginning up to the date I start, or a range between 2 dates. For podcasts that have existed for a long time I find it hard to work through the back catalog in any consistent way.

xk3

yt-dlp works with many but not all podcast websites. You could download everything with metadata and mtime and then sort by earliest to most recent in a file browser.

I wrote a tool that might help with this if you don't want to download the files immediately but it definitely isn't required if you just download everything and use yt-dlp's download-archive.

    pip install xklb
    lb tubeadd podcasts.db 'http://www.hellointernet.fm/podcast?format=rss'
    lb listen podcast.db  # it will keep track of what you played and prioritize playing things that haven't been played before

And later do tubeupdate to check for new episodes:

    lb tubeupdate podcasts.db

If the website extractor provides metadata about file creation (eg. YouTube extractor) then you could use this to play the oldest videos first:

    lb listen podcast.db -u time_modified

If you want to download later you could do this:

    lb dl podcast.db --audio  # with the above example it saves to the folder "Generic" in the current working directory since it uses the yt-dlp generic extractor

https://github.com/chapmanjacobd/library