get_iplayer 1.00 released

Yeah, yeah, before you say it - I know my version numbering system is rather pathetic. However version 1.00 has been released because this is actually the 100th version. There are, however, some useful features that have recently been added:
‘--tree’ option: Displays the lists of programmes or matching programmes in a sort-of tree view
‘--hide’ option: [...]

Is your broadband connection too slow for BBC iPlayer?

Given that I don’t actually suffer from this problem I guess it is not surprising that I didn’t realise until now how useful get_iplayer is for people with slow ‘broadband’ connections. I have recently heard that several people use get_iplayer to download because watching the BBC iPlayer via the flash web page just keeps pausing [...]

New BBC iPlayer Mobile uses WMV with DRM

Looks like my prediction in this earlier post was not quite right. Things are marginally better and much worse;
The Bad news: The BBC eventually announced that the iPlayer Mobile download service would in fact not be using 3GP/H.264 but in fact DRMed WMV HTTP downloads (yes that’s a Windows video format!).
The good(ish) news: The resolution [...]

BBC iPlayer download client will use ‘platform-neutral’ AIR with DRM

Erik Huggers, ex-Microsoft BBC Director of Future Media & Technology, has just announced that the BBC, in partnership with Adobe, are building a platform-neutral download client.
It will use the Adobe Integrated Runtime, or ‘AIR’.
Unfortunately, even though AIR is supposed to be platform-neutral, Adobe, in their wisdom have chosen again (as with flash) to prohibit the [...]

get_iplayer RPM and DEB packages now available

You can now install and update get_iplayer using DEB and RPM packages for Linux. I’ve tried to keep them as generic as possible so the RPMs will most likely work just fine on all Redhat/Fedora derived Linux distributions. Same goes for the DEB packages on all Debian derived distros such as Ubuntu.
Please let me know [...]

get_iplayer has new BBC iPlayer PVR functionality

Ever wanted to automatically download your favourite BBC iPlayer programmes and podcasts? Well now get_iplayer v0.84 can act as a quite sophisticated PVR.
It allows you to download any number of iPlayer / podcast programmes using any combination of search terms that you would normally run on the get_iplayer command line. This includes searching by [...]

Improved ‘Sign Zone’ Programme Support for get_iplayer

At long last I have included proper support of programmes that are signed in get_iplayer v0.83, i.e. those in the ‘Sign Zone’ category of the BBC iPlayer TV. You can now search for programmes based on their version; The version can be one of many different types. Most are default and a good few are [...]

get_iplayer now downloads BBC iPlayer Radio in glorious 128k MP3 format + other features

It was discovered this evening that the iPhone can get BBC iPlayer radio programmes in higher quality MP3 format. It basically uses the same method used for the iPhone video downloads. get_iplayer v0.74 now supports this fully and can also fallback to RealAudio format for those shows that still have not been made available to [...]

Nokia N95/N96 BBC iPlayer Downloads working on Linux with vlc

It would appear that the BBC have already made a stream available which looks like the one going to be used in the upcoming N96 iplayer download service. I may have jumped the BBC’s gun here slightly; I used get_iplayer to extract the media stream data for a programme and fed this to vlc (a [...]

get_iplayer now has Subtitle download support

Having recently noticed that subtitle support is now widely available on the iPlayer website, I thought I’d have a go at providing the ability for get_iplayer to download them (from version 0.61 onwards). So after some packet sniffing and perl hacking I have added subtitle support. It downloads the subtitles in W3C Timed Text format [...]