Sadly from experience get_iplayer is not a viable alternative to Radio 
Downloader - largely due to the former's or its associated apps' instability.

1/ I have tried to set up a WebPVM List - it took hours in between crashes of 
the Perl script - always at line 307 being unable to 'fork' whatever that 
means. 

2/ Then there are the empty packets reported by RTPDump which always terminates 
a download. And attempts by the PVM List to restart the download a failed 
operation always ends up in a cycle of failures that go on and on. To stop this 
the Perl command window and WebPVM window have to be manually closed / crashed. 

3/ And the latest irritation is that many downloads are apparently completing 
successfully but when I check the file sizes / recording lengths I find that 
they are in fact truncated. Deleting these bad files from the download 
directory doesn't work and runing the PVM List again doesn't work, because the 
history file already thinks that they have been downloaded successfully and it 
refuses to let them be downloaded again.

This then means gong into the history file and manually editing out the 
reference to the bad files, and then trying again. 

An alternative is to use --force but this is only available in command mode not 
in the Web PVM window; but the Wiki documentation on --force is in the 'still 
to do' category.

4/ get_iplayer needs a rock steady broadband of wifi connection. Any hiccup 
immediately results in empty or lost packets which results in a failed download 
and likely manually termination of the PVM List.

I have about 13 programmes in my PVM List - when I run this I am lucky to get 
two successful downloads. Then I have to clear up the mess left behind by the 
failures such as editing the history file or deleting partial files. Then I 
have to try again and again and again; eventually resorting to --force for the 
last few rogue downloads.
  
CJB.

Date: Fri, 5 Jul 2013 14:12:23 +0100
From: Jon Davies <j...@hedgerows.org.uk>
To: get_iplayer <get_iplayer@lists.infradead.org>
Subject: Re: Radio Download Alternatives
Message-ID:
    <CAJEH5C2-x=fwDePPVf=83mz48pgoslxhgvq0hahgleyhb+v...@mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1

(please reply to the list, not to me)

On 4 July 2013 15:41,  <michael.mpirel...@virgin.net> wrote:
> One thing Radio Downloader did that I found useful was to offer a very 
> wide-ranging - maybe
> even comprehensive - list of BBC radio programmes to which one could 
> subscribe on the
> offchance that they might reappear.
>
> In addition if one subscribed to the News Quiz, say, one's subscription was 
> not restricted to
> the current series.
>
> Maybe these features are hidden somewhere in get-iplayer but, if so, I have 
> not found them.

I routinely use get-iplayer to do just this.  I use the command line
because that suits me, so something like




   get_iplayer --type radio "News Quiz" --pvr-add news_quiz




will download everything with "News Quiz" in the name, regardless of
what series it is.




You can do the same through the web interface by entering some search
terms which match the programme/s youre' interested in (without
specifying the series number) and clicking "Add Search to PVR".  (The
"Add Series" link against a programme picks a search that includes the
series number - which matches what the button says but isn't what you
want ;-)




> One could therefore say that get-iplayer is restricted to the current 
> offerings but Radio
> Downloader could be used to be on the watch for repeats of past favourtes.
there are ways of doing pretty much anything with get_iplayer - the
challenge is almost always working out how to, or finding where in the
rather distributed documentation to find out.




> Many thanks to the maintainers of both programs.
that would be almost entirely dinkypumpkin nowadays.




Regards
Jon


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