So yesterday I tried downloading Catch Me If You Can in HD as usual by typing:

get_iplayer --pid b0074g3y --modes=best

But for some reason it downloaded it in SD (960x540 instead of 1280x720).

I thought maybe I'd made a mistake, so I tried the same command again (adding --force at the end) but it made no difference.

What I have noticed is that the title of the downloaded file reads:

get_iplayer_-_b0074g3y_b0074g3y_prewatershed

...If that helps?

Has this happened to anyone else?

Is it because this is set as: 'Download not available.'?

TIA

I don't know when you did the downloads at your end but I downloaded the film successfully in HD at around 0200 hrs this morning.

The "prewatershed" suffix merely means that some content of the film has been edited to take account of the fact that it was being broadcast before the waterhsed, nothing more.

A number of modes are made available by the BBC and they are not always available at the same time. On a number of occasions I have had to wait a few hours for the HD version to be made available after the SD versions had been released.

You can always test what modes available at a particular time by interrogating with an --info, eg:
get_iplayer --pid xxxxxxxx --info  
replacing xxxxxxxx with the actual PID of the programme.

So I think it finished downloading at 23:16 last night (the second time).

I can't remember exactly but that's what the file properties tell me (or maybe that's when I started downloading it the second time).

In any case, that is very interesting, cheers.

I'll try downloading it again now and see if anything changes.

So yeah, I did:

get_iplayer --pid b0074g3y --modes=best --overwrite --force

...and it worked fine!

I had a feeling it would because I immediately noticed on the command prompt that the file size read something like 2300MB instead of 1700MB like it did the second time I downloaded it.

Cheers!