'Synchronizing' Podcasts with a Portable Device

Do you also like listening to podcasts? I do and my usual use case is the following: At first I discover a new podcast on the web. Then I use a program like gpodder or Miro to download all the episodes, which end up in one plain directory of the hard drive. At last I want to 'synchronize' the episodes with a portable device.

A lot of the time the portable device will have less memory than the size of the downloaded files or it is not desirable to fill up the portable device with just one podcast. So 'sychronizing' should copy only some episodes at a time to the portable device and remember which episodes have been copied. After listening/watching an episode, it can be deleted on the portable device to free some space for new episodes. New episodes should be copied during the next synchronization. No more capabilities except for playback and deleting episodes are assumed on the side of the portable device. My use case is a bit similar to the use cases discussed here.

The following script implements this idea of synchronization. It does so by building a simple Sqlite-Database which contains the information if an episode has been copied to the portable device already.