Programme info from PID

[Christopher Woods (CustomMade)]

> On 14/2/2011, at 8:17am, Bill Lancaster wrote:
> 
> > Is it possible to get the time a programme will be 
> broadcast from just 
> > the PID?
> > 
> > For example b00yhv30 refers to a brodcast on Radio 4 on Friday 18th
> 
> 
> Not sure how unhelpful this answer is, but the PIDs are fairly unique.
> 
> Thus the first hit when Googling this PID is for the 
> episode's homepage at the BBC, which reveals that the show 
> airs at 9am on Friday 18th.

Sorry I sort of mis-answered with my earlier reply, but using the string I
put together earlier will still give you some broadcast information - and
some clues - but not the exact info you're after.

It'd be useful for you to read this thread first:
http://linuxcentre.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=160

For the ZingZillas example I used earlier, the full metadata includes these
fields:

firstbcast:     default: 2010-04-05T08:00:00+01:00
firstbcastrel:  default: 315 days 8 hours ago
index:          918
lastbcast:      default: 2010-04-05T08:00:00+01:00
lastbcastrel:   default: 315 days 8 hours ago

Using

expiry:         2011-02-18T08:59:00Z
expiryrel:      in 3 days 16 hours

You could /kinda/ figure out when it was last broadcast using those two
fields, as most material is 28 days except for regularly repeated or very
popular shows (such as my ZingZillas episode, or strangely the latest
episode of Top Gear) which has a 7 day on-demand window. [1]



You can see broadcast dates of course on the programme's respective
/programmes page; http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00rzt4f#broadcasts for my
example.

As magic144 replied on that linuxcentre forum thread;

"I was under the impression that the <lastbcast> tag in the generic XML file
referred to the actual most-recent broadcast for the episode in question,
but did not necessarily correspond with the actual broadcast date of the
episode played/downloaded"

Which seems to be borne out in my own investigation. It looks like you're
going to have to manually grok the /programmes page for the programme to get
the actual most recent broadcast date. The only readily available place
where you can get forthcoming broadcast dates from is the /programmes page
(c.f. forthcoming ZingZillas episodes:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00s1lvw/episodes/upcoming )

Sadly what we're trying to achieve here just doesn't appear to be possible
because the Beeb don't supply the specific info you're after in the
accompanying metadata. 'expiry' and 'expiryrel' is probably the closest
you're going to get. However, I'm more than happy to be proved wrong :-)


[1] As an aside, the latest Top Gear episode currently has a 7 day on-demand
window
(http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00ymwfn/Top_Gear_Series_16_Episode_4/
) but the previous episodes all expire on the 20th of March. The earlier
episodes also have HD versions available; the latest episode does not. I
have a feeling the longer on-demand window is applied when the BBC HD
version becomes available, the 7 day window being for the default BBC2 SD
version. (only an educated guess though, is this right or am I wide of the
mark?)