Podcasting : Atom 1.0 support and Downloading of podcasts
The current podcasting implementation needs some work. There was some code commits made back in feburary to add support for Atom 1.0 based podcasts, but the current version of VLC still does not support Atom 1.0. Note that Atom based podcasts can have more than one enclosure per entry. ("entry" is atom equivalent of an rss "item") Not sure how you would want to handle multiple enclosures. Maybe offer an option in the preferences for the user to set which mime types they want VLC to download, and ignore the rest.
Secondly, VLC doesn't actually download the podcast, but plays them directly. There should probably be an option available to have VLC download new content to the harddrive. You may also allow an option for the user to set how often the feed is checked for updates. (And maybe add support for the cloud publish-subscribe protocol)