Module to play specific audio files from the web on demand

This is funny - I actually have an agi script that gets this very same podcast, and also one for CNN, that I found in a blog post and slightly modified. It's probably not the world's best approach either, but it's got to be better than the shell script approach. The drawback is that it uses perl (actually pperl, "persistent perl", but I think regular perl works just as well), so you have to make sure the necessary perl modules (in the first few lines) are installed. I'll put the CNN one here because it does include a call to lame (not sox) to do the audio conversion:

#!/usr/bin/pperl

use XML::Simple;
use Asterisk::AGI;
use LWP::Simple;

$AGI = new Asterisk::AGI;
$xml = new XML::Simple;
$noext = "/tmp/newscnn";
$resampled = $noext . ".mp3";

$AGI->verbose("Getting XML file\n",1);
$data = $xml->XMLin(get("http://www.cnn.com/services/podcasting/newscast/rss.xml"));
$url = $data->{channel}->{item}->[0]->{link};
$AGI->verbose("Extracted URL $url from XML file",1);
$url =~ m#(?:.*/)(.*)$#;
$podcast = "/tmp/" . $1;
if ((-s $podcast) && (-s $resampled))
{
  $AGI->verbose("$podcast already exists - skipping download\n",1);
}
else
{
  system("rm /tmp/CNN-News*.mp3");
  $AGI->verbose("Getting $url\n",1);
  getstore("$url", "$podcast") or die "Could not retrieve podcast";
  $AGI->verbose("$podcast retrived\n",1);
  system("lame --silent --mp3input --scale 2 --abr 32 -m m -h $podcast $resampled")==0 or die "Could not convert file";
  $AGI->verbose("$pd converted to $resampled\n",1);
}
$AGI->answer;
$AGI->exec('Playback',$noext);
$AGI->hangup;
exit;

The above code is saved under the name /var/lib/asterisk/agi-bin/msnbcnews.agi and then gets called (e.g. from extension_custom.conf) using something like this:

exten => _.,1,Ringing
exten => _.,n,AGI(cnnnews.agi)
exten => _.,n,Hangup

This code was obtained (with the exception of minor changes) from a three-part blog series here, here, and here. I'm sure that if this were ever to be included in FreePBX the developers would probably want to rewrite it in PHP and make it more generic, but this at least gives a logic path to follow, and may be useful to someone as is.

Description change was unintentional, I typed wiki formatting codes in the wrong box (and have removed them, so the description should be as it was after I post this).

Ack! One more try at restoring the original formatting by the OP.