PVR and CGI question - automatic unattended download

[Jon Davies]

On 18 August 2011 21:11, Jon Nicoll <jkn+gip at nicorp.co.uk> wrote:
> Hi All
>        I've been a happy command-line user of get_iplayer fro quite a while now
> ... running fine under Gentoo, mainly to grab radio content.
> I'm a little bit puzzled about one aspect of this though. It looks as though I
> have to manually click on the 'Run PVR' tab at the top of the screen to cause
> the get_iplayer process to actually do the downloading .The page there says
> "The PVR will auto-run every 4 hour(s) if you leave this page open".
>
> What I expected to be able to do is to add my searches and have the PVR run on
> the Vortexbox, say every four hours, without me having the browser up at all.

You can.  If you leave the browser window open, then the cgi script
will do get_iplayer --pvr-run periodically, but you only need to do
this if you can't (or don't want) to use cron (or some equivalent).

> The README-get_iplayer.cgi.txt file says (in part):
>
>        Setup crontab for PVR to run
>        ----------------------------
>        * Add a line in /etc/crontab to run the pvr:
>
>        "0 * * * * apache /usr/bin/get_iplayer --pvr 2>/dev/null"
>
> which I have done (after changing the path to /var/www/get_iplayer).
>
> Am I missing or misunderstanding something?

Not really ;-)  There seem to be at least two ways of doing everything
in get_iplayer, and in this case you can run the pvr from cron or from
the cgi script, and the cron example runs the PVR on the hour every
hour.

I run get_iplayer from cron, but choose to set the pvr to run once a
night (just after midnight when my ISP's unmetered bandwidth period
kicks in) thus:

10 0 * * * /usr/bin/get_iplayer --refresh --pvr-run >
~/.get_iplayer/pvr.log 2>&1

Cheers
Jon