Downloads failing since Thursday 19th

[thekernel]

It only breaks streaming if your streaming back end cannot resume.

ffmpeg and mplayer both break. i am reluctant to install vlc (but i obv will if it works) because of the qt deps. Could you perhaps recommend another solution?
Thanks.

This may be down to your distro
Mine works great, even though it has to retry at about every 10% increment
Using flvstreamer,
ffmpeg from packman

[linuxcentre]

It only breaks streaming if your streaming back end cannot resume.

ffmpeg and mplayer both break. i am reluctant to install vlc (but i obv will if it works) because of the qt deps. Could you perhaps recommend another solution?
Thanks.

Yes actually you are right. If the swf verification message pops up then streaming directly to a player will not work. The reason is that if you resume it is hard currently to tell where *exactly* in the stream it got to without a file to check the last frame. I tried just estimating the resume and automating this but the media players cannot reliably handle the stream discontinuity. So I guess the BBC change has forced you into recording the whole stream first. I guess you could just kick off the recording in the background then stream the flv file while it records... Which is a shame because I liked streaming programmes to see what they were like from the Web PVR Manager.

[BillD]

I did a test run using 'flashvhigh' after changing the number of retry attempts and it appears OK. I've not had a chance to play it.
However, I did notice that it downloaded the subtitles every time it resumed. Although, this works it doesn't seem ideal.
Is there any way to prevent this?

[linuxcentre]

Yes, get v2.72 there is a fix for that. Thanks for the bug report!

[BillD]

Yes, get v2.72 there is a fix for that. Thanks for the bug report!

Looks OK. Now only downloads subtitles once. On programme I tried (b007rsj5) it only appeared to stop once during the download. This is different from my last download. I haven't add a chance to try watching it.

[bvm]

It only breaks streaming if your streaming back end cannot resume.

ffmpeg and mplayer both break. i am reluctant to install vlc (but i obv will if it works) because of the qt deps. Could you perhaps recommend another solution?
Thanks.

Yes actually you are right. If the swf verification message pops up then streaming directly to a player will not work. The reason is that if you resume it is hard currently to tell where *exactly* in the stream it got to without a file to check the last frame. I tried just estimating the resume and automating this but the media players cannot reliably handle the stream discontinuity. So I guess the BBC change has forced you into recording the whole stream first. I guess you could just kick off the recording in the background then stream the flv file while it records... Which is a shame because I liked streaming programmes to see what they were like from the Web PVR Manager.

erugh, what a shame! This is a real pain for me, because when you only have 4gb of diskspace, 3gb of which is taken up by Arch- downloading becomes a chore and in some cases, an impossibility. The new flash beta doesn't help matters either. Thanks for your help.

[JohnDinton]

If anyone wants the opportunity to tell the BBC Trust what the shortcomings of the iPlayer are, and how it needs to be improved, there is a survey at
https://consultations.external.bbc.co.u ... nsult_view
It is a 24 month review of on-demand services. Responses need to be in by 12th March.

[Chris_BBR]

Just started using get_iplayer - thanks for the great software!

I don't think this is much of a problem - flvstreamer recovers just find AFAIK - it just take multiple attempts to get the sections of the programmes. See my post above re: --attempts=50

For what it's worth, even with --attempts=50, my latest flashhd attempt has just stopped after an hour, and only managed to download 186 seconds of programme in that time.

I'm using get_iplayer v2.72 and FLVStreamer v2.1c1 on Mac OS X 10.5.8, with a command line of:

Code: Select all

./get_iplayer --modes=flashhd --type=tv --flvstreamer="./flvstreamer-2.1c1" --output "tmp" --raw --whitespace --metadata generic --pid b00qbvyc --attempts=50

By comparison, a flashvhigh download went through perfectly at the first attempt.

Cheers, Chris

[linuxcentre]

Just started using get_iplayer - thanks for the great software!

I don't think this is much of a problem - flvstreamer recovers just find AFAIK - it just take multiple attempts to get the sections of the programmes. See my post above re: --attempts=50

For what it's worth, even with --attempts=50, my latest flashhd attempt has just stopped after an hour, and only managed to download 186 seconds of programme in that time.

I'm using get_iplayer v2.72 and FLVStreamer v2.1c1 on Mac OS X 10.5.8, with a command line of:

Code: Select all

./get_iplayer --modes=flashhd --type=tv --flvstreamer="./flvstreamer-2.1c1" --output "tmp" --raw --whitespace --metadata generic --pid b00qbvyc --attempts=50

By comparison, a flashvhigh download went through perfectly at the first attempt.

Cheers, Chris

Is your internet connection speed really low by any chance? After all, the attempts number must be greater than the number of muinutes you'd need to record the programme.

Can anyone else reproduce this problem?? I tried it with same versions on linux using both flashhd1 and flashhd2 with no trouble...

[Chris_BBR]

Is your internet connection speed really low by any chance? After all, the attempts number must be greater than the number of muinutes you'd need to record the programme.

Thanks for the prompt reply! I'm on 2 MB broadband and can reproduce the same problem on another Mac that shares the same router. Other downloads are no problem whatsoever - e.g. iPlayer radio programmes as iPhone mode mp3 files come through consistently at the rate of 100 Mb in 15 minutes. My uninterrupted flashvhigh download was nowhere near as fast as that though - at 650 MB in 3.5 hours it felt like it was being throttled server-side.

After the initial 50 attempts, I resumed the flashhd download by re-running the command line instruction as you suggested in a previous post, but it simply kept re-downloading the same 6-second segment ad infinitum, looping between the "RTMP_ReadPacket, failed to read RTMP packet body" and "Ignoring SWFVerification request, no CRYPTO support" errors. Would it help if I ran it again with verbose output and posted extracts from the activity log here?

Cheers, Chris