history of britain in numbers

[Jeremy Nicoll - ml get_iplayer]

Jim Lesurf <web at audiomisc.co.uk> wrote:

>I'm having a problem downloading the last episode of the recent 'History of
>Britain in Numbers' series on Radio 4. There are 10 episodes and I got the
>first 9 with no problem using my usual method. However when I try gip with
>
>--type=radio --no-tag --pid=b053c3pd
>
>it fails with the error
>
>no specified modes available for this programme with version 'default'.
>
>All the other episodes seem fine with the default 'flash' modes. gip then
>suggests I try 'mode=' but I have no idea what to try, or why there's a
>problem.

No-one's clairvoyant here.  You have to run gip with  --verbose   to get
more useful error & progress messages (and then share with us the relevant
bits).  Normally doing that would list the details of all the qualities
(modes) available of a programme, and the sources (ie which CDNs) they could
be fetched from.

I suspect that --verbose  output will show you that only the "WMA1" mode is
available (that's to say, the first instance it finds of a WMA mode).  Gip
will normally pick one of the available modes, depending on what mode you
ask for.  With a command like your one, a default quality/mode choice would
be attempted (and --verbose will show that too).  

Probably the problem is that your version of Gip has been unable to parse
the right info off the right BBC web pages; using GiP 2.91 may fix that.

If you ever need to choose a mode you can do so with eg 

  --mode modename       or  -- mode modea,modeb,modec

(ie a single mode or a list of modes in preference order).  Normally people
use ambiguous mode names eg 

   flashhigh

but you can also ask GiP to use a particular CDN's programme by specifying
eg 

   flashhigh2

that being the second flashhigh source it found (as listed by --verbose).



>The item plays OK with firefox and the usual web interface. The page shows
>the above pid. So I'm curious as to why just one episode out of ten should
>differ from the others.

Maybe the programme got released to the CDNs in a non-standard way (or it
happened over the weekend and didn't work correctly so it's listed somewhere
but not actually present, or maybe it's just one more of those peculiar BBC
inconsistencies.


(As a side issue: have you explored GiP's help command?  And read through
all the options (listed by, IIRC, --longhelp)?  Reading posts here helps
too.  Also each specific release of GiP has detailed release notes (on the
website); you certainly need to read those as you change from one release to
the next.) 

-- 
Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own.