Now this this can of worms has been opened, I decided to mix metaphors
and take the bull by horns and iron out some subtitles-related issues
raised in the last couple of days. I've posted a patched version of
get_iplayer here:
https://raw.github.com/dinkypumpkin/get_iplayer/feature/subtitles/get_iplayer
The patch against Git HEAD is here:
https://github.com/dinkypumpkin/get_iplayer/compare/feature;subtitles.patch
With this patch, subtitles should be formatted as they would be in the
Flash player on the iPlayer site (incl. explicit line breaks), with one
exception. When there is a change of speaker in a subtitle, a leading
hyphen is prepended to that speaker's dialogue. The first (or only)
speaker in a subtitle does not get a leading hyphen. The old subtitle
format is geared to broadcast use and employs colour changes to indicate
speaker changes. The diabolical new format doesn't do that as far as I
can tell, and the iPlayer site's Flash player has always ignored speaker
changes. Given that, there is no point in attempting to add colour
support to get_iplayer subtitles. The leading hyphen seems like an
acceptable compromise.
It would be helpful if anyone interested in getting subtitles sorted
would have a go at testing this. The may be other format variations
lurking in iPlayer that I would never come across. Please do it soon -
I want to resolve this so I can get another release out. You don't need
to download a programme to check subtitles. These are repeatable test
commands that will download only the "raw" subtitles file and convert it
to SRT:
get_iplayer --subtitles-only --subsraw --force --overwrite --pid=<pid>
get_iplayer --subtitles-only --subsraw --force --overwrite --get <index>
If you check subtitles during playback and find big chunks of dialogue
missing, first check the raw subtitles files before blaming get_iplayer.
I have found several programmes with missing dialogue.
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