I'm running 3.16 downloaded from github on Ubuntu 16.04.

All goes well often but I find many radio downloads are hanging at the stage:

INFO: Converting to M4A
INFO: Command: "ffmpeg" "-loglevel" "fatal" "-stats" "-y" "-i" "/home/ukuser/BBC_Proms_2018_-_Prom_14_Sibelius_Schubert_and_Zimmermann_b0bbssp7_original.hls.ts" "-c:v" "copy" "-c:a" "copy" "-bsf:a" "aac_adtstoasc" "/home/ukuser/BBC_Proms_2018_-_Prom_14_Sibelius_Schubert_and_Zimmermann_b0bbssp7_original.partial.m4a"
size=  360277kB time=02:32:59.98 bitrate= 321.5kbits/s
INFO: Command exit code 0 (raw code = 0)
INFO: Downloading thumbnail
DEBUG: Using desktop user-agent string: 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/51.0.2704.79 Safari/537.36 Edge/14.14393'
DEBUG: Using NoCookies user-agent 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/51.0.2704.79 Safari/537.36 Edge/14.14393'

INFO: Downloading URL (1/3): https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/images/ic/192x108/p06dr49p.jpg

This never completes.

After a little debugging I've determined that the it's hanging on line 1777 in request_url_retry.

$res = $ua->request( HTTP::Request->new( GET => $url ) );

Follow our instructions to provide a proper report so we can see what is happening on your system. Let the command hang for a minimum of 4 minutes before killing it. Before that, you may want to try downloading with --no-artwork to see if it makes a difference when thumbnail download is skipped.

I've been getting similar problems with a Proms download that requires the same thumbnail as the original poster. Leave it for long enough and it eventually completes.

In fact while I was writing a post for this thread and attaching a verbose log (all now deleted), my repeated attempt at a hung download completed successfully.

However, I've no explanation as to why this particular thumbnail jpg (and possibly others) takes so long to download.

"BBC Proms 2018 2018-08-06 Proms at _ Cadogan Hall 4 Dame Sarah Connolly and Joseph Middleton.m4a"
just took about 9 minutes to complete tagging, so be prepared to wait at least that long if a download hangs.

As shown by OP, thumbnail download occurs before tagging begins. If tagging starts, thumbnail download isn't hung, or has timed out. Time required to apply metadata tags is unrelated to thumbnail download.

Ubuntu 16.04

I used the following command to download Prom 31.


I'm recording to a local drive.

b0bd7z5z.txt

Thanks for the log. Unfortunately, it didn't contain any additional clues. For whatever reason, the version of libwww-perl on 16.04 can't download that particular thumbnail image. It's not worth investigating further since get_iplayer isn't the problem. Use --thumbnail-size to select a different size other than the default (192). Any other size seems to work. Also, a partial retraction: three attempts are made to download the thumbnail (I thought it was only one), so it could take 9 minutes (3 per attempt) for a thumbnail download to time out.

Thanks for this.

On my system the thumbnail doesn't download at all and it doesn't timeout.

I'll select a different thumbnail size.

Thanks for sharing the answer here, I'm really looking for this solution of Proms 192x108. Thank you for helping