history of britain in numbers

[Vangelis forthnet]

On Mon Mar 2 14:20:01 GMT 2015, Jim Lesurf wrote:

> So I'm curious as to why just one episode out of ten
> should differ from the others.

As George has guessed, you are probably running
an older version of GiP; latest tag 2.91 downloads
your programme fine:

perl get_iplayer-291.pl --type=radio --pid=b053c3pd --modes=flashaac --force

(I am getting the flashaaclow1 version from my overseas IP).

I do not know the extent at which you are familiar with the
inner workings of iPlayerRadio and, hence, GiP, but this last of
the 10 available episodes:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03k5dvd/episodes/player
uses only the mediaselector/5 API URL to generate stream data;
the previous 9 also use the older mediaselector/4 API URL.

for 27/02/2015:
pid=b053c3pd
JSON playlist:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b053c3pd/playlist.json
=> "vpid":"b053c1by"
mediaselector/4 API:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediaselector/4/mtis/stream/b053c1by
=>  "notavailable"
mediaselector/5 API:
http://open.live.bbc.co.uk/mediaselector/5/select/version/2.0/mediaset/pc/vpid/b053c1by
=>  available flash streams!

Your old copy only uses the ms/4 API to retrieve stream data and thus fails.
2.91 by default uses another method to find the vpid string
(http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b053c3pd.xml),
but then by default tries the ms/5 API to get access to streams (and 
succeeds).

As an exercise (!), compare the above with episode 26/02/2015,
i.e. pid=b053bsfw ...
Cheers,
V.