Help with downloaded radio file formats and thumbnail jpgs please.

[Jon Davies]

On 20 May 2012 16:52, Alastair <ajebay at errichel.co.uk> wrote:
>...
> Where I am having problems is with downloaded radio shows which are saved as .m4a
> files which I understand to be MP4/AAC files.  I could convert these using soundKonverter or
> similar for example and in future I assume I could include --aactomp3 in command line
> (not sure how with --pvr mode as cron job.  Put in preferences perhaps?)
It should work if you just specify --aactomp3 on the command line with
--pvr-add.  Alternatively if you want it to apply all the time add it
to your preferences.

> However for
> classical music I would rather use a lossless mode of compression...
To get the best quality you should avoid transcoding at all, and
transcoding to something that's lossless, like flac, will simply make
the file bigger with no other effect.  The audio is in aac format on
the iplayer site, and by default get_iplayer remuxes this into an
mp4/m4a wrapper.

> Also the files which come as m4a seem to lack any tagging
> whilst mp3 podcasts come with extensive tagging.
If AtomicParsley is available then get_iplayer will use it to tag mp4
files.  You may need to tell get_iplayer where to find it
(--atomicparsley <path>).  If you're running on Windows or most
linuxes this should just work out of the box.

(If you're running get_iplayer on an unusual box (like on the NAS
itself, or something other than windows, macos or desktop linux) then
you might need to build your own AtomicParsley - the source lives
here: https://bitbucket.org/wez/atomicparsley/overview)

> Finally please could I have guidance on how get_iplayer handles jpg thumbnail files.  I see
> that these are downloaded at the end of a programme and then vanish.  What am I doing
> wrong please?
--thumb should prod get_iplayer to download (and keep) the thumbnail image
There are some other thumbnail options to tweak, but if get_iplayer
doesn't keep a thumbnail with the above then something else is wrong.

Jon