BBC Radio Scotland, Highlands and Islands schedule variation discontinued...

[Vangelis forthnet]

Hello all :-)

Being physically located many thousands of kilometers away
from Scotland, I am in no position to check this myself,
but an internet search has shown that
(regional) BBC Radio Scotland
comes in five schedule variations:

BBC Radio Orkney
BBC Radio Shetland
BBC Radio Highlands and Islands
BBC Radio Scotland FM
BBC Radio Scotland MW

When GiP refreshes the radio cache and Regional Stations
have not been excluded [--refresh-exclude-groups-radio=regional],
all 5 schedule variations for BBC Radio Scotland are being web-scraped.

It may well look as though, from Aug 1st 2018, the
BBC Radio Highlands and Islands variation HAS BEEN
DISCONTINUED!

For populating the caches, I am currently on a heavily modded
older version of GiP (3.01+personal patches); when I refreshed
the radio cache manually, I noticed the following:

WARNING: Failed to download schedule page:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radioscotland/programmes/schedules/highlandsandislands/this_week

That URL redirects in a browser to

https://www.bbc.co.uk/schedules/p00fzl8f/2018/w32

Highlands and Islands Schedule
Broadcast schedule ended on Tuesday 31 July 2018

The redirection to PID-based schedule page URLs
was implemented already in GiP 3.14:
https://github.com/get-iplayer/get_iplayer/commit/aa8fd57

Recent versions of GiP have become very silent in their
output, perhaps you don't get any warning with 3.16 when
you manually refresh the radio cache and no schedule is
returned for BBC Radio Highlands and Islands currently.

Running

get_iplayer --type=radio --fields=channel "BBC Radio Scotland"

I get "354 Matching Programmes", but it's hard to tell how many
of them are unique to the H & I variation; if you're on latest GiP
(3.16) and want to prevent it from trying to scrape a non-existent
schedule page (for BBC Radio Scotland, H & I variation),
you can comment out (#) line 7303 of the vanilla 3.16 script:

'p00fzl8f' => 'BBC Radio Scotland', #
radioscotland/programmes/schedules/highlandsandislands

I am certain a future release of GiP will
take care of this in a proper fashion...

Best regards,
Vangelis

[Alan Milewczyk]

On 07/08/2018 00:27, Vangelis forthnet wrote:

Good to hear from you, dear friend.

Post by Vangelis forthnet
It may well look as though, from Aug 1st 2018, the
BBC Radio Highlands and Islands variation HAS BEEN
DISCONTINUED!
I get "354 Matching Programmes", but it's hard to tell how many
of them are unique to the H & I variation;

Just had a quick look at the main FM page and the local variants and it
seems that the only variations are for local news based programmes when
the local stations do a half hour opt-out e.g. "Around Orkney" in the
middle of "Good Morning Scotland" or "Good Evening Shetland" in the
middle of the afternoon show "Newsdrive".

However I notice the Twitter feed @BBCHighlands is still live and
tweeting away. This shows that BBC Highlands (News) Bulletin is being
uploaded to Soundcloud. This appears to be a six minute segment three
times a day at weekdays and once a day at weekends.

It all looks like a cost cutting measure.

A


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[g***@eycott.co.uk]

I got a warning about it when I refreshed the cache yesterday using the latest version of gip, but given that I don't download anything from Radio Scotland I just ignored it....


On Tue, Aug 7, 2018 at 12:28 AM +0100, "Vangelis forthnet" <***@the.forthnet.gr> wrote:

Recent versions of GiP have become very silent in their
output, perhaps you don't get any warning with 3.16 when
you manually refresh the radio cache and no schedule is
returned for BBC Radio Highlands and Islands currently.

[Vangelis forthnet]

@Alan & @george, thanks for the feedback :-)

Post by Vangelis forthnet
It may well look as though, from Aug 1st 2018, the
BBC Radio Highlands and Islands variation HAS BEEN
DISCONTINUED!
(snip)
if you're on latest GiP (3.16) and want to prevent it
from trying to scrape a non-existent schedule page
(for BBC Radio Scotland, H & I variation),
you can comment out (#) line 7303 of the vanilla 3.16 script
(snip)
I am certain a future release of GiP
will take care of this in a proper fashion...

This has now appeared in the "Known Issues" section of the wiki:

https://github.com/get-iplayer/get_iplayer/wiki/issues#get_iplayer-known-issues

Post by Vangelis forthnet

2018-08-06 (v3.16): From 2018-08-01, there is no longer a broadcast
schedule published for BBC Radio Scotland Highland and Islands.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/schedules/p00fzl8f/2018/w32
ERROR: Response: 404 Not Found
The error messages can be ignored.
The affected schedule page URLs will be removed
in the next release of get_iplayer.

V.