[ANN] get_iplayer 2.95 released

[Vangelis forthnet]

On Sun Jul 3 20:03:58 BST 2016, Owen Smith wrote: 

> Another piece of software dropping Vista support 
> almost a year before the end of official Microsoft support, sigh.

 Hello Owen et. al. 

 I do not want to contribute needlessly to a thread 
that can pretty soon go seriously OT, but as a Vista 
co-user (Home Premiun SP2 x86 fully updated) I, too, 
fill miffed that software authors are placing Vista 
in the same fate to XP, if not worse...

 MS ends Extended Support for Vista in April 2017, 
so we're not quite there, yet; though they are making it 
quite hard for current Vista users to receive and 
apply latest Microsoft Updates (search the web, 
it's all over the place). And Vista, unlike Win7, 
isn't eligible for the free Win10 upgrade, which 
will expire on July 29th (2016) anyway...

 IE9 is now (/will soon be) unsupported on many 
sites, and my most serious concern currently is
Chromium dropping Vista support prematurely; 
this means that Google Chrome and other chromium-based 
browsers don't function in their updated versions 
on Vista anymore; this leaves Mozilla Firefox, 
but for how long?

> Well I haven't used get_iplayer for several months, 
> this probably means I never will.

 To be fair to dinkypumpkin, 

>> As far as is known, get_iplayer, 
>> its dependencies and the Windows installer 
>> still work on XP and Vista

you can TRY NOW to upgrade to and use GiP 2.95 
because I CAN, TOO, ASSURE YOU it 
currently works fine on Vista  - Strawberry perl    
package has been upgraded to "5.24.0.1-32bits", 
FFmpeg to v3.0, rtmpdump to 
"RTMPDump v2.4-102-ga3a600d-get_iplayer", 
all the above work flawlessly on Vista - so you 
shouldn't be over-dramatic :-)

 We do not know when things willl again 
completely break for GiP - the coder has 
stated he'll be removing soon support for 
RTMP streams, even before the beeb do 
(I have my objections to that, but little 
does that count) - this'll put rtmpdump 
out of the equasion, too - and FFmpeg 
is delegated now (in 2.95) to simply remuxing 
to the MP4 container (by default); I'm 
sure a Vista compatible (archived?) FFmpeg 
version will continue to do the job nicely...

 The worst case scenario would be the 
need for the coder to write perl code 
that depends on perl modules/binaries 
compiled without Vista support 
(I fear the StrawberryPerl site won't offer 
Vista compatible binaries once Vista 
loses MS support...). 

But who really knows the fate of GiP in 
the (near) future? Recent decisions made 
by the UK politicians to be enforced at 
the start of next year may "break" it for 
all OSes, Windows or not... 

On Sun Jul 3 20:48:53 BST 2016, Owen Smith wrote: 

> I use Vista at home and Win 7 at work 
> and I have to say there's not a lot of difference between the two. 
> Drivers are freely interchangeable, most desktop features 
> are very similar, the underlying kernel is only mildly different. 

I also have access to sister's Win7 (64bit) laptop, 
so I have to echo completely what said there by Owen! 
 Apart from some things (some major, most minor) under the hood, 
Vista SP2 itself is a fine OS that I personally 
prefer to Win7+; from a safety standpoint, 
having a very low marketshare, it is not very 
appealing for exploitation by malicious code 
authors and if you take all the needed standard 
precautions (MS OS updates, software updates, 
antivirus/antimalware updates, "sane" internet 
behaviour), then I suspect you're not at a 
larger risk than other Win OSes...

> I may either stick with Vista forever 
> or upgrade to Win 7 and stick with that forever.

I fear "forever" doesn't apply nicely in this case...

== End of OT discussion ==

Kind regards, 
Vangelis.