[BBC iPlayer] Unable to download XML

[oneplusme]

Make sure you are using the latest version: run youtube-dl --version and ensure your version is 2018.03.26.1. If it's not, read this FAQ entry and update. Issues with outdated version will be rejected.

• I've verified and I assure that I'm running youtube-dl 2018.03.26.1

Before submitting an issue make sure you have:

• At least skimmed through the README, most notably the FAQ and BUGS sections
• Searched the bugtracker for similar issues including closed ones
• Checked that provided video/audio/playlist URLs (if any) are alive and playable in a browser

What is the purpose of your issue?

• Bug report (encountered problems with youtube-dl)
• Site support request (request for adding support for a new site)
• Feature request (request for a new functionality)
• Question
• Other

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If the purpose of this issue is a bug report, site support request or you are not completely sure provide the full verbose output as follows:

Add the -v flag to your command line you run youtube-dl with (youtube-dl -v <your command line>), copy the whole output and insert it here. It should look similar to one below (replace it with your log inserted between triple ```):

./youtube-dl -v --print-traffic --cookies=new.cookies -F https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b094f5h4

**stdout**
[bbc.co.uk] b094f5h4: Downloading video page
[bbc.co.uk] b094f5h4: Downloading playlist JSON
send: b'GET /iplayer/episode/b094f5h4 HTTP/1.1\r\nHost: www.bbc.co.uk\r\nUser-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:59.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/59.0 (Chrome)\r\nAccept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7\r\nAccept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8\r\nAccept-Encoding: gzip, deflate\r\nAccept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5\r\nConnection: close\r\n\r\n'
reply: 'HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently\r\n'
header: request-id header: X-Cache-Action header: Vary header: X-Cache-Age header: Cache-Control header: Content-Type header: Date header: server-timing header: location header: x-xss-protection header: x-content-type-options header: x-response-time header: Connection header: x-frame-options header: Content-Length
send: b'GET /iplayer/episode/b094f5h4/oran-na-marasong-of-the-sea HTTP/1.1\r\nHost: www.bbc.co.uk\r\nUser-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:59.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/59.0 (Chrome)\r\nAccept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7\r\nAccept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8\r\nAccept-Encoding: gzip, deflate\r\nAccept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5\r\nConnection: close\r\n\r\n'
reply: 'HTTP/1.1 200 OK\r\n'
header: request-id header: X-Cache-Action header: Vary header: X-Cache-Age header: Cache-Control header: Content-Type header: content-encoding header: Date header: server-timing header: link header: x-xss-protection header: etag header: x-content-type-options header: x-response-time header: Connection header: Set-Cookie header: x-frame-options header: Content-Length
[bbc.co.uk] b094f5h4: Downloading legacy playlist XML
send: b'GET /programmes/b094f5h4/playlist.json HTTP/1.1\r\nHost: www.bbc.co.uk\r\nCookie: BBC-UID=955a0b6a577b3e3c9895b926b1ee8a1f75e69691a7b4c4061ab0774234b4e7a00Mozilla/5.0%20(X11%3b%20Linux%20x86_64%3b%20rv:59.0)%20Gecko/20100101%20Firefox/59.0%20(Chrome)\r\nUser-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:59.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/59.0 (Chrome)\r\nAccept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7\r\nAccept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8\r\nAccept-Encoding: gzip, deflate\r\nAccept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5\r\nConnection: close\r\n\r\n'
reply: 'HTTP/1.1 200 OK\r\n'
header: Server header: X-Cache-Action header: Vary header: Cache-Control header: X-Cache-Age header: Content-Type header: Content-Encoding header: Date header: Content-Language header: Access-Control-Allow-Origin header: Etag header: Connection header: X-UA-Compatible header: Access-Control-Allow-Headers header: Content-Length
send: b'GET /iplayer/playlist/b094f5h4 HTTP/1.1\r\nHost: www.bbc.co.uk\r\nCookie: BBC-UID=955a0b6a577b3e3c9895b926b1ee8a1f75e69691a7b4c4061ab0774234b4e7a00Mozilla/5.0%20(X11%3b%20Linux%20x86_64%3b%20rv:59.0)%20Gecko/20100101%20Firefox/59.0%20(Chrome)\r\nUser-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:59.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/59.0 (Chrome)\r\nAccept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7\r\nAccept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8\r\nAccept-Encoding: gzip, deflate\r\nAccept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5\r\nConnection: close\r\n\r\n'
reply: 'HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found\r\n'
header: Content-Type header: Date header: Connection header: Content-Length 

**stderr**
[debug] System config: []
[debug] User config: ['--cookies', '/home/userid/.youtube-dl.cookies']
[debug] Custom config: []
[debug] Command-line args: ['-v', '--print-traffic', '--cookies=new.cookies', '-F', 'https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b094f5h4']
[debug] Encodings: locale UTF-8, fs utf-8, out UTF-8, pref UTF-8
[debug] youtube-dl version 2018.03.26.1
[debug] Python version 3.6.4 (CPython) - Linux-4.15.12-x86_64-Intel-R-_Core-TM-_i5-4570T_CPU_@_2.90GHz-with-gentoo-2.4.1
[debug] exe versions: ffmpeg 3.4.2, ffprobe 3.4.2, rtmpdump 2.4
[debug] Proxy map: {}
ERROR: Unable to download XML: HTTP Error 404: Not Found (caused by <HTTPError 404: 'Not Found'>); please report this issue on https://yt-dl.org/bug . Make sure you are using the latest version; type  youtube-dl -U  to update. Be sure to call youtube-dl with the --verbose flag and include its complete output.
  File "./youtube-dl/youtube_dl/extractor/common.py", line 519, in _request_webpage
    return self._downloader.urlopen(url_or_request)
  File "./youtube-dl/youtube_dl/YoutubeDL.py", line 2199, in urlopen
    return self._opener.open(req, timeout=self._socket_timeout)
  File "/usr/lib64/python3.6/urllib/request.py", line 532, in open
    response = meth(req, response)
  File "/usr/lib64/python3.6/urllib/request.py", line 642, in http_response
    'http', request, response, code, msg, hdrs)
  File "/usr/lib64/python3.6/urllib/request.py", line 570, in error
    return self._call_chain(*args)
  File "/usr/lib64/python3.6/urllib/request.py", line 504, in _call_chain
    result = func(*args)
  File "/usr/lib64/python3.6/urllib/request.py", line 650, in http_error_default
    raise HTTPError(req.full_url, code, msg, hdrs, fp)


...
<end of log>

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Description of your issue, suggested solution and other information

youtube-dl fails against https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b094f5h4 with a 404 error from the "Downloading legacy playlist XML" stage.

[Ballz2k7]

I have the same issue with the latest version on both windows and linux. If I give it a URL that contains a page with all the episodes of a box set it errors out with an xml error.
As a work around I wrote a simple python script that uses PhantomJS and a regex to strip the url's for me, then I pipe those into youtube-dl.

urls = re.findall('"href":"(/iplayer/episode/.*?)"', driver.page_source)

Then I just write out the list appending https://www.bbc.co.uk before the links found.