Difficulty saving a video

[Sam Kuper]

On 18 July 2011 19:19, dinkypumpkin <dinkypumpkin at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 17/07/2011 21:57, Sam Kuper wrote:
>>
>> ERROR: Failed to record 'Thermal imagery in the desert - -
>> (http://www.bbc.co.uk/learningzone/clips/thermal-imagery-in-the-desert/3204.html)'
>> ...
>> > Clearly this didn't work, despite my having provided a long set of
>> fallback modes. I'm unsure how to proceed, and would welcome
>> constructive suggestions!
>
> FWIW, I was able to download this clip with a very small patch to get_iplayer.  AFAICT, the access token for this clip is ultimately returned with "auth=" already prepended, which get_iplayer doesn't expect and thus duplicates, giving a bogus query string for the rtmp URL.  This appears to be peculiar to Akamai CDN connections, but not necessarily all of them.

Excellent news that the work needing to be done to fix this in
get_iplayer was, as I expected, minor. Thank you!

> As Nigel Taylor pointed out earlier, this isn't related to iPlayer content per se,

You're the third person to mention this (I had one off-list reply
too), and I must say: new to get_iplayer though I may be, I think all
three of you are flat wrong to mention it.

Why? Because the description of get_iplayer's features given at
http://linuxcentre.net/getiplayer includes the following:
"Recording/Streaming of Embedded media in BBC Learning Zone, Archive
and News sites." Since the embedded media file to which this thread
pertains is in the BBC Learning Zone site, it therefore clearly falls
squarely within the purview of get_iplayer, and it is entirely proper
that if get_iplayer cannot handle it, it should be patched in order to
be able to handle it.

If the problem had been due to one of the libraries or utilities upon
which get_iplayer depends, then I would have been happy to report the
bug to the corresponding mailing list or bug tracker, but since you
were able to write a patch for get_iplayer to fix the issue, it does
seem that the fault lay with get_iplayer rather than with a different
piece of software.

> but a workaround seemed benign enough that I could roll it into my get_iplayer fork.  Hope I don't eat those words.

Given what I've mentioned above, I see no reason why you should end up
having to eat those words. Yay :) Indeed, I hope that your patch will
be reviewed and incorporated into the get_iplayer main branch!

I'll try out your patched version asap and report back when I get a chance.

Thanks again for your help!

Sam