Nitro API

[Jon Davies]

On 3 June 2015 at 15:08, Kevin Lynch <klynchk at gmail.com> wrote:
> Looking at it in glass half full way maybe the use of the nitro API
> could be something that's easily incorporated into get_iplayer if the
> implementation of the API is get_iplayer friendly

The nature of the licensing for Nitro probably makes it unsuitable -
you need an API key to gain access, and so either that API key would
be published in the get-iplayer source, and probably abused and then
disabled, or we'd have to build some server infrastructure between
get-iplayer and Nitro (the intended approach) - which I can't see
being viable.

But the nitro data seems to be appearing at bbc.co.uk/programmes,
which describes itself as "a permanent rolling record of everything on
BBC Television and Radio".  Most urls there can be pulled with .xml or
.json suffixes.  e.g.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/genres/childrens/player/episodes.xml
yields a list of all (tv) episodes currently available on iplayer in
the "Children's" genre.  I looked briefly at walking the genre tree
(for radio in particular) and it looks like a viable way of getting
some reasonably good metadata in a way that would remove the need to
hard-code either tv/radio channels or genres.  I just keep failing to
find time to do enough to build a working prototype. (I've had a proof
of concept working, but never had time to build the rest of the stuff
to offer a patch for get-iplayer.)  I think, but I'm not entirely
sure, that it would be possible to use the /programmes feeds to build
the indexes, and then use the existing remainder of get-iplayer to
download the actual programmes, and walking the genre tree would make
it straightforward to determine the category of programmes and hence
re-enable searching for radio programmes by category.

Jon