Radio categories

[Vangelis forthnet]

On Sun Feb 15 05:29:21 GMT 2015, M Clark wrote:

> but have no idea what ION radio feeds are.

ION stands for "iPlayer Object Notation".
The ION feeds infrastructure was developed for
the release of BBC iPlayer v3 in 2010; archived info at:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/legacy/bbcinternet/2010/06/under_the_bonnet_of_bbc_iplaye.html

You can find detailed ION feed documentation at:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/ion/doc/

A channel feed is a single URL (associated with a
single Radio Station/TV channel) that aggregates
metadata for ALL programmes from that channel
currently available in iPlayer - the old availability
time window was 7 days, so the (old) ION feeds
contain metadata for a week's worth of programmes...

An example BBC Radio 2 feed would be:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/aod/availability/radio2.xml

GiP loads and parses feeds when to populate the
tv & radio caches.

> But I am confused as there is category information
> in both the .rdf and .xml urls
> for radio programmes and I thought it was from these,
> certainly .rdf, that metadata was obtained.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/[pid].xml (or .rdf)

is a metadata resource for an individual programme (pid)
that is accessed and parsed after the download command
has been issued (and this for new versions of GiP and only
if the --playlist-metadata switch isn't used); the metadata
found can be used e.g. to populate a more complete
tag scheme of the end file but, as I hope you can see,
CAN'T BE USED BEFOREHAND to sort out the
available programmes within the respective cache.
(Jeremy has said in fact the same thing more
eloquently, being the native (and excellent) English
speaker/user that he is :-) )

Regards,
Vangelis.