Hi Everyone,
I've had this thought for quite sometime, at least a year now, & it is this.
There have been times I've been running out of space on my laptop & there were programmes that were due to not be available for downloading due to the 7/30 day availability period & I thought if only I had some Cloud Storage & I knew how to download the programmes to there then I could download the programmes from the Cloud Storage to my laptop anytime & there is no expiry date.

So, I know that GiP downloads the programmes to a specific directory (in Windows) & you can specify a different location using the switch --output & then the location/directory you want it downloaded to e.g. G:\iPlayer but does anyone know how you could directly download the programme to Cloud Storage & no your PC?

If that was possible would it also not be ultra quick to download/save to the Cloud Storage?

Unless you have fibre broadband, you will have a very slow upload speed (probably 0.8 Mbit/sec or even 0.4 Mbit/sec) even if you have a fast download speed. That's what the A in ADSL means - asynchronous DSL. So it will take ages to upload large video files to the cloud, even if it is then fairly quick to download them again afterwards.

At 0.8 Mbit/sec, and taking, as a rough approximation, 10 bits = 1 byte (allowing for overheads), then that's 80 KB/sec and a 1 GB file is going to take about 1,000,000,000 / 80,000 = 12500 sec - about 3.5 hours.

With fibre broadband, where you get around 10 Mbit/sec (1 MB/sec) upload and maybe 40 Mbit/sec download, things are a bit better: the upload time is reduced to 1,000,000,000 / 1,000,000 = 1000 sec = 17 minutes.

Still a fairly long time.

I would suggest that if you are going to do it, you should initially download to your hard disk to get it safely downloaded, and then set aside a long time to copy the file from there to your cloud storage.

But unless you have a lot of cloud storage, you'll fill it up very quickly. Video files are BIG.

Thanks for your reply martinu.
Yes, I do realise that upload speeds are slow if you haven't got fibre broadband if you were to upload a programme from one's own PC/Laptop/Tablet etc. But what I was thinking was if it were possible to instead of downloading the programme to your PC, to directly save it to the Cloud instead & then at a future point to then download it to your PC in your own time. So consequently the programme would go from the BBC Servers to your Cloud Storage.

Not possible with get_iplayer.

Okay Dinky, thanks, I just wondered & it would've been awesome if it were possible.

It's "*technically*" possible if you set the output to a folder that's synced with a Cloud Service. (but you'll still have the running out of local room problem!)

Or Their are programs that you can buy to let you mount a Cloud folder as a networked folder in Windows.

Again these will be very slow unless you have a Fiber broadband connection.

I did have my Google Drive mounted as a remote drive on my Ubuntu (Linux) desktop for a while. It let me read and write like any other networked drive. Never used it for iPlayer though.

But don't see why it would not work abet slowly!

Obviously, though it would be safer to move the entire file to a sync directory after download is complete.  But that's not what Mystic Merlin was asking about. What s/he wants is not possible with get_iplayer or any other application.

Interesting thoughts/comments solitaire & thanks Dinky.
I had read/heard somewhere last year that if one were to have say 2 Cloud Storages, say Google Cloud & BT Cloud & say there were files on both & obviously they were both set up in your name, you could, with additional software or service, be able to transfer files from one to the other or vice versa without them having to pass through or downloaded to & then uploaded from your PC. So they would transfer from the one Servers Cloud to the other at I believe, high speed.

Based on that idea I was hoping that there were a way that the BBC programmes, that would normally download to your PC, could be sent directly to whichever Cloud Storage chosen & so bypassing the download to the PC. And then when you are ready to download to your PC you can do it from the Cloud in your own time. The other bonus is that wherever you are on holiday & you've got access to the Net & your Cloud Storage, you then would have access to the programmes. And dare I even suggest that if you were to have a PC set up at home to automate recordings of programmes that were also automated to store in the Cloud whilst you are on holiday abroad, you would then obviously have access to the programmes if you have access to the Net.

Wishful thinking & if not possible now maybe in the future lol

The BBC is not going to provide a service for you to send non-DRM files to your cloud storage service. This thread is veering well off-topic, so I'm closing it now.