Now that categories are gone, in order to save wading through a lot of programmes that don't interest me, I use a rather long --exclude= command that lists a great wodge of programme names, and then pipe the results to a much more manageable text file for perusal.

Not wanting to upset Auntie in any way, I wonder, is the processing for that command done on the server, and do you think it would cause any performance hit or other issues? It does take a fair while to parse. Or is it the case that get_iplayer gets the full list from the server and then parses any exclusions locally?

is applied locally. Long lists of excluded programmes are always going slow things down. is really intended to refine results from other filters.