For anyone not familiar with this excellent monthly astronomy programme, it
is first broadcast on BBC One late on a Sunday night (around midnight) as an
abridged 20min version, then an extended 30min version first airs on the
coming Thursday on BBC Four at 19:30. Both versions are then repeated
several times among BBC One, BBC Four, BBC Two & BBC HD.
For the past years, the practice followed was that the 20min edition was
always unavailable on the iPlayer, only the 30min edition was made available
after its airing on a Thurday [and the HD version of this 30min edition is
never made available, also (???)].
Now the beeb make both versions available on the iPlayer but, in their
infinite wisdom, have chosen to give to both of them the SAME pid (programme
ID), and just different vPID (version pid). This month's show (titled: "The
Story of Stuff") has pid=b01ns1cv, the 20min version has vPID=b01nthxz and
the 30min one has vPID=b01ns1cq.
If I run in get_iplayer this command:
get_iplayer -i --type=tv --fields=pid b01ns1cv
or this command:
get_iplayer -i --type=tv "The Sky at Night"
I can see that the 20min version is marked as "default2" and the 30min one
as "default", but there's only one index in the TV cache (=970 at the time
of writing), corresponding to the "default" version (i.e. 30min). Hence,
every attempt to record "The Sky at Night" by get_iplayer fetches the
extended edition of the show:
get_iplayer "The Sky at Night" --get --modes=flashvhigh --force or
get_iplayer --pid=b01ns1cv --modes=flashvhigh --force
I have consulted get_iplayer --helplong and the obvious solution to
add --versions=default2 to the download command simply does not work - it
returns:
INFO Trying to stream pid using type tv
INFO: pid found in cache
Matches:
970: The Sky at Night - The Story of Stuff, BBC One, Factual,Science &
Nature,TV, default
INFO: 1 Matching Programmes
INFO: No versions of this programme were selected (default are available)
So, is there a way to download the short (20min) version of the show with
get_iplayer?
FYI, I have managed to download this specific version with another tool
(FRD) or manually, by visiting
http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediaselector/4/mtis/stream/b01nthxz
and from there getting the necessary info to construct a working rtmpdump
command (with an extra help
of RTMPdumpHelper, that is...). But in theory, get_iplayer should also be
able to do it!
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