Your message to get_iplayer awaits moderator approval

[C E Macfarlane]

This is precisely the sorts of reason I tend not to get involved in
development lists for other people's software.  The usual run of events goes
something like ...

Phase 1:	You suggest what you see as an enhancement.

Phase 2:	Instead of judging the SPIRIT of the enhancement on it own merits
or lack of them, the developers insist that you 'submit it properly',
whatever that might mean in the particular context.

Phase 3:	You make an attempt to do so.

Phase 4:	The developers find some technical or procedural reason to reject
your enhancement, as in ...

>	Leaving that aside, I still couldn't accept this
>     patch.  Making a feature like this both configurable and
>     optional isn't
>     a "desirable improvement" - it is required.  Otherwise, the principal
>     effect of your code would be to break get_iplayer for all
>     Windows users
>     - not an option.

FFS, NATURALLY I KNOW THAT JUST AS WELL AS YOU DO!  While, I, like I would
guess everyone else here, am very grateful for your work on GIP, the bottom
line is that it's not MY software to develop, it's YOURS.  When someone
suggests a possible improvement to my website, I don't tell them to go away
and learn HTML and JavaScript, and submit the proposed changes in working
web form.  I genuinely thank them for their suggestion, because IME they are
almost always positive, and then either agree with it or not, as the case
may be, giving reasons in support.  In suggesting, rightly or wrongly, that
the incorporation of nice to GIP would a good idea, I didn't expect as a
result to have to submit complete and fully working code patches in an
unfamiliar language.  A simple yes or no and supporting reasons would have
been quite sufficient, but you required me to submit sort of patch just so
that you can pull it to pieces.  That sort of attitude, which unfortunately
I have met before, is hardly likely to encourage me to make suggestions in
future.

>     > 2)	This patches get_iplayer v2.90 to use ffmpeg rather
>     than mplayer to
>     > convert *.flv to *.mp3:
>
>     This has come up several times before.  Most versions of
>     ffmpeg/avconv
>     in the wild require suppression of all error messages in
>     order to avoid
>     those messages generated during remux to MP3.  In principle,
>     that never
>     seems like a good idea.

That is true, but it's better than having mplayer dump its core, which leaks
system resources, and over repeated use brings an embedded device with
limited resources to its knees.

>     > 3)	This patches ffmpeg v2.4.2 (possibly other
>     versions) to avoid said
>     > conversion above producing myriads of redundant warning messages:
>
>     It's not necessary to hack ffmpeg.  Just use -loglevel

Doesn't this rather contradict what you write above?