Downloading Subtitles-Only

[dinkypumpkin]

On 10/01/2013 15:29, dinkypumpkin wrote:
> On 10/01/2013 15:05, Kapitano wrote:
>> When I run this:
>>
>> get_iplayer --type tv --subtitles-only --terse --search .*
>> --file-prefix="<name> - <episode> - <dldate>"
>>
>> ...GiP doesn't just list what subtitles are available, it downloads the
>> srt files. And if I run it again, it downloads them again.
>>
>> If I run it on different days, I get identical srt files with different
>> datestamps in the filenames. If I do that with only
>> --file-prefix="<name> - <episode>", it overwrites the previous downloads
>> without asking.
>>
>> Is there a way to prevent all of these happening? Or am I missing
>> something incredibly obvious?
>
> The only thing you're missing is that get_iplayer is working as
> intended.  From the man page:
>
> --subtitles-only
>        Only download the subtitles, not the programme
>
> The --subtitles-only option means "download only the subtitles for the
> programmes which match the search condition or programme ID".  You can't
> search for only those programmes which have subtitles.  The programme
> metadata used for searching does not include any indicator of whether or
> not a particular programme has subtitles.  To get that information
> requires retrieving the stream information for each programme, which
> would mean another ~1000 web requests for BBC TV, 3000+ for BBC radio -
> not practical or efficient.  Instead, you just add the --subtitles
> option to --get or --pid and get_iplayer will grab the subtitles if they
> exist.  The --subtitles-only option effectively works the same way.

I should add that you can use the --info option to check if particular 
programmes have subtitles. The "modes" value will contain "subtitles1" 
if they are available.