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 (see this post) and converts them into a more widely supported format, i.e. SubRip (.srt).
There is a rather annoying caveat though; The iPhone H.264 iplayer streams do not exactly match the flash versions; They often start a few seconds earlier which results n the subtitles being shown too early and out of sync with the audio 
So, as a workaround, I’ve added an option to munge the subtitle timestamps during download to add an arbitrary offset in milliseconds 
To use this feature the program must, of course, have subtitles. You need to use the --subtitles option and optionally --suboffset nnnn, e.g:
get_iplayer --get Miller --subtitles --suboffset 3500
SubRip appears to be supported by mplayer, xine and vlc so hopefully you’ll be able to try this out.
The latest version of get_iplayer seems to have broken my ability to download programmes, it says it cannot get the o.gif webbug.
Matches:
INFO: 2 Matching Programmes
217: Helicopter Heroes: Series 2 - Episode 12, ‘BBC One’, Factual,TV, Origina
l
344: Panorama - Can Money Grow on Trees?, ‘BBC One’, Factual,News,TV, Origina
l
INFO: Attempting to Download: Helicopter Heroes: Series 2 - Episode 12
INFO: Programme is reported as ready for download
INFO: Checking existence of Original version
ERROR: Failed to get o.gif web bug from iplayer site
ERROR: Could not whitelist cookie
INFO: Attempting to Download: Panorama - Can Money Grow on Trees?
INFO: Programme is reported as ready for download
INFO: Checking existence of Original version
ERROR: Failed to get o.gif web bug from iplayer site
ERROR: Could not whitelist cookie
@Alex,\.get_iplayer\cookies’. Maybe it has no permissions to create ‘\Documents and Settings\ \.get_iplayer\’. I have removed it on my system and it creates the cookies file and/or directory just fine so I am having trouble working out why this may be. The script now uses %USERPROFILE% to determine where to find the .get_iplayer directory. What does ‘echo %USERPROFILE%’ show you?
I have tried this with v0.65 on Win32 (WindowsXP and ActivePerl - what you are using?) and I can only suspect that get_iplayer cannot write to ‘\Documents and Settings\
C:\Documents and Settings\Alex>echo %USERPROFILE%
C:\Documents and Settings\Alex
C:\Documents and Settings\Alex>
I have a custom hosts file, and I just searched that for “bbc”, and stats.bbc.co.uk was listed on there as 127.0.0.1, I have removed that line, and get_iplayer no longer has any problem, (apart from the programme I want to download not being realy for download yet!)