Winter Olympics live stream recording

[dinkypumpkin]

On 11/02/2014 20:55, Paul Phillips wrote:
> I think the latest Git Head is picking up the live stream from the
> player page but something wierd is happening at the end when the
> stream finishes.  That's my hunch.  The player pages seem to have
> things feeding into them - eg the main channel sometimes feeds into
> them. It's as if they are channels in their own right with different
> feeds going into them

Seems plausible, but I've no real idea.  It still seems strange that a 
static resource like one of the event guides would overwrite a live 
stream.  I don't understand how an output file would be overwritten at 
all unless they're monkeying with the streams and rtmpdump gets 
confused.  It's impossible to tell from the log what is going on.

I've made another change to HEAD that refreshes the values of <dldate> 
and <dltime> for each download attempt for a live stream.  Those two 
parameters are in the default value of <fileprefix> for live streams, so 
the effect would be to create a new output file every time rtmpdump 
croaks and get_iplayer restarts the download. That should probably be in 
get_iplayer anyway. I don't know if it will completely prevent files 
being overwritten on your machine, but give it a try if you're feeling 
brave.

Another approach would be to choose a single CDN and quality (e.g., 
--modes=flashhd1) and --retries=1 to prevent additional download 
attempts if rtmpdump croaks.  But if it chokes in the middle of the 
event, that will be the end of the recording.

Anyway, I'm throwing in the towel on this.  I'll leave the changes in 
HEAD until the Olympics are over, though.  As you said, you can still 
use the "olympics" branch version of get_iplayer with playlist URLs 
picked out of Firefox web console or similar.  For anyone keeping score, 
that means you can fall back to the earlier instructions here:

http://www.mail-archive.com/get_iplayer@lists.infradead.org/msg05225.html