Will-Luck/iplayer-arr v1.8.2

on GitHub

v1.8.2
Fixed

• Downloads and quality checks work again. Since 21 October 2026 the BBC
  has redirected every bbc.co.uk/programmes page to a "Service
  Temporarily Unavailable" page, including the playlist.json that
  iplayer-arr used to find an episode's stream, so every download failed
  with parse playlist: invalid character '<' looking for beginning of value. iplayer-arr now looks episodes up through iPlayer's own API
  (iBL), the same one search already uses. GitHub #57.
• A programme that is airing live is no longer resolved to its live
  stream: a 24-hour pop-up channel or a programme on air now reads as not
  yet available until the BBC publishes the on-demand version.
• A programme that only exists as an audio-described or signed version
  downloads that version, and its heights are no longer cached, so a
  396p audio-described version cannot stand in for the programme's
  qualities.
• Heights the BBC serves only from live-channel suppliers, which happens
  at 720p for a few minutes after a broadcast, are no longer cached, so
  the 1080p version that follows is advertised once it exists. A show's
  first probed episode also no longer passes uncached heights on to the
  rest of the show.
• Cancelling a download while the BBC is slow to answer an episode or
  stream lookup now stops it at once. Before, the lookup carried on, and
  the failure it eventually returned put the cancelled download back in
  the queue.
  Changed
• When the BBC answers with an HTML page where JSON was expected, the
  error says so, with the page it redirected to and its title, instead of
  invalid character '<'. This covers search and the episode lookup.
• A failure to get an episode's details from the BBC (an HTML page, an
  unexpected response, a timeout) is now reported as
  metadata_unavailable instead of stream_unavailable. It retries every
  5 minutes for up to an hour, from its own retry budget, so Sonarr sees
  the grab as queued through a short BBC outage. A later grab of the same
  episode and quality starts afresh instead of being handed the failed
  entry.
• An episode PID must be lowercase letters and digits; anything else
  fails without contacting the BBC.
  Upgrade notes
• On start, downloads that failed to resolve since 21 October 2026 are
  re-coded to metadata_unavailable (logged with their IDs), so grabbing
  them again works, and any still retrying start again with a fresh
  retry budget. Nothing is deleted.
• Sonarr and Radarr: grabs that failed during the outage are probably on
  the blocklist. Remove the iplayer-arr entries from 21 October onwards
  (Activity, Blocklist), then search for the missing episodes.
• API users: send the same POST /api/download again. Short clips such
  as highlights expire after about a day, so some may no longer be on
  iPlayer.