Massive download problems..

[Andy Bircumshaw]

On 25/5/2011, at 10:30pm, Nic Siddle wrote:

> I have been using get-iplayer on my 32 bit Windows 7 set up for some months without issue. Today I set the PVR to run from the list previously used, but came back to find that it had already downloaded 22 gb of programmes and appeared to be working its way through the compete A-Z list of available programmes.
> Have the BBC changed something?
> Do I need to delete and re-create my PVR list or refresh the cache? - or what?
> Any advice would be welcome

As per Debian Bug #611473, you probably ran a blank `get_iplayer --pvr-queue`. Since an empty string will match every programme in the cache, doing this will (I think) add ever programme in the cache to the queue.

You can check this by running `get_iplayer --pvr-list`.

On Linux it's fairly easy to remove the excess entries by:

   get_iplayer --pvr-list | grep ONCE | cut -f 3 -d ' ' > file.txt

   for foo in `cat file` ; do get_iplayer --pvrdel $foo ; done

You should, *with care*, be able to do something similar with DOS shell-scripting.

I believe that get_iplayer used to have a hard-coded limit never to return more than 20 results at a time, so you could never accidentally add more than 20 shows at a time to the pvr-queue. I believe this was removed since Phil ceased development, but presumably no check has ever been added to reject empty search strings as queries. 

In fact it would make  sense, I think, to reject search strings of less than 3 letters, as searches for ' ' (the space character) and "in", for example, both return far too many results. Searching for "in" returns 208 results, "new" only 18.

aB.