Educating Archie

[dinkypumpkin]

On 03/01/2013 16:08, Vangelis forthnet wrote:
> 1. Why do the wma versions (UK & non-UK) not get detected
> as available radiomodes, if they are there?

The BBC metadata changed slightly, so wma streams were no longer 
detected.  Now fixed in Git repo.

I'm not sure this will do anybody any favours.  The only case I can 
imagine someone begin desperate enough to use the wma streams is the 
rare instance (such as this one) when the rtmp streams for a programme 
are broken. As you pointed out, mplayer (used by get_iplayer) is not a 
reliable downloader.  The VLC command line approach is a little better, 
but not much.  VLC will at least sometimes retry a download that fails, 
but that just means your download time is twice as long.  Sometimes it 
just hangs.  It's probably best to do as you suggested and pick out the 
ASX playlist URL and bang it into VLC to download manually.  With the 
new changes to get_iplayer, you can use --streaminfo to get the URL:

get_iplayer --type radio --streaminfo "educating archie"

The wma stream info looks like this:

stream:     wma1
authstring:
bitrate:    128
ext:        wma
identifier: b009gc54/iplayer_intl_stream_wma_uk_concrete
priority:   10
server:     http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediaselector/4/asx/
streamer:   mms
streamurl: 
http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediaselector/4/asx/b009gc54/iplayer_intl_stream_wma_uk_concrete
swfurl: 
http://www.bbc.co.uk/emp/revisions/18269_21576_10player.swf?revision=18269_21576
type:       (iplayer_intl_stream_wma_uk_concrete) mms wma9 128kbps 
stream (CDN: asx/10)

The "streamurl" value is the ASX playlist URL.

> 2. Let's focus on the UK-only detected "flashaaclow2" radiomode;
> If you try to record this (from a UK IP):
>
> get_iplayer --type=radio --pid=b009gc5s --modes=flashaaclow2 --force
> --verbose
>
> you'll see that the recording fails:

The "flashaaclow2" mode pointed to a 3gp stream, which get_iplayer can't 
download.  Those streams used to be ignored, but apparently the BBC 
metadata changed. Now fixed in Git repo.