I've just discovered the existence of the various metadata options and so was trying to download it for all my historical downloads.

However I'm seeing this error for both metadata and thumbnails, using the cmd examples in the Help docs:

>get_iplayer --metadata-only --metadata --history --skipdeleted ".*"
get_iplayer 3.20.0-MSWin32, Copyright (C) 2008-2010 Phil Lewis
  This program comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY; for details use --warranty.
  This is free software, and you are welcome to redistribute it under certain
  conditions; use --conditions for details.


ERROR: Could not extract a valid PID from ARRAY(0x321a2f4)
INFO: 0 total programmes


> get_iplayer --thumbnail-only --metadata --history --skipdeleted ".*"
get_iplayer 3.20.0-MSWin32, Copyright (C) 2008-2010 Phil Lewis
  This program comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY; for details use --warranty.
  This is free software, and you are welcome to redistribute it under certain
  conditions; use --conditions for details.

ERROR: Could not extract a valid PID from ARRAY(0x321a2f4)
INFO: 0 total programmes

The metadata and thumbnails download fine for specific programme PIDs, so any ideas what's wrong?

Check for garbage in download history file. First field of every line should be a PID, not ARRAY(...). If that doesn't bear fruit follow our instructions to provide a proper report so we can see what is happening on your system.

Also ensure you didn't screw up your preferences: https://forums.squarepenguin.co.uk/thread-1241.html

The Download_history looks fine (well to my untutored eyes!). Verbose cmd log attached. This is on Windows 10/64.

log.txt

Just saw the latest reply.
Aha it was this offending line in options:
pid ARRAY(0x321a2f4)

No idea how it got there, but I deleted it, and now it's all working fine - thanks!

From v3.21, you can no longer save --pid to default options file