Hi,

First of all I love love love get_iplayer and want to thank you for your hard work on it!

I have a lot of friends who want to try it, but are scared off by the complicated installation process. These people could probably use the simple command line interface but are scared off when you start talking about homebrew and throwing around a lot of technical terms right from the getgo.

I think this tool would see a lot more use if the installation process could be simplified so the average computer-literate user could install it without needing other packages. Admittedly this is not my area of specialization within CS so I do not know how easy this would be.

Thank you again,
Catrìona

hi,
Which operating system are you running?

I have a MacBook running High Sierra; it was not easy even for a CS student to install. My friends I believe mostly run Windows but the installation is too complicated and time consuming for them to figure out.

been some time since i installed it on my Windows 8, from what i remember it was click and install did its stuff and nothing for me to do, the upgrade a few months back was the same.

Maybe different for Windows 10 and also the last update. Sorry not much help for you but i'm sure someone else will come who knows more than me

No, it's the same on Windows 10, download installed, install and everything that is required is just installed.

Is it definitely the "installation" that's the problem or the usage of it once installed? I can see people not used to using a command line having trouble using get_iplayer.

Just reading the OSX guide for installation it doesn't look that involved;

https://squarepenguin.co.uk/downloads/mac-os-x/

Looks like 3 commands to be typed and that's it.

I can share the windows installer with anyone who has windows but I think the mac installation is nontrivial, at least it was for me since I had to uninstall and reinstall the homebrew a few times before I could get it to work. Commenting on the mac installation, after just looking at the page my friend wrote:

"Hmm. I don't think I even know where to begin. I think I need more programming knowledge for this. I would need someone to go through the installation step by step with me and I know neither of us has time for that."

In order to update it recently, I had to uninstall and reinstall and get xcode command line interface. Admittedly those are problems with homebrew not get_iplayer, but I still wish there was a simpler way to get get_iplayer for mac.