On 29.02.16 I went to download my usual selection of BBC1 offerings and got this message:

WARNING: Running the updater again to obtain plugins.
INFO: Current version is 2.94
INFO: Checking for latest version from www.infradead.org
ERROR: /usr/bin/get_iplayer is not writable - aborting update (maybe a package manager was used to install get_iplayer?)

Tried several times, but with the same result.  Do not understand why it tried to update at all as everything worked fine before.

It looks like you removed or emptied $HOME/.get_iplayer/plugins. You can repopulate it manually by downloading the necessary files from GitHub.

Thank you user-2, I will try that.

Tried GitHub, couldn't make head or tail of any of the offerings. Any other way of obtaining these files? Incidentally I have no recollection of deleting or even knowing of the existence of these files.

You haven't said what distro you use or how you installed get_iplayer in the first place. Let's start from there instead.

Ubuntu 14.4 LTS. As far as I remember I googled and manually installed it as instructed. It was about a year ago and has worked perfectly until 29-02-2015 when I got the message. To my knowledge nothing was altered.

Since you use Ubuntu, the best course of action would be remove get_iplayer and install the PPA build using the Ubuntu instructions in the wiki.  There is really no reason to do a manual install on Ubuntu. Plus, you won't break the PPA build if you remove plugin files in your profile directory again. Alternatively, you can try temporarily making /usr/bin/get_iplayer writable, then running get_iplayer with no arguments to trigger the plugins update. FWIW, this plugins update nonsense has been removed for the next release.

Thanks for your help. much appreciated