Mar 11 2009

New and Improved Automated Windows Installer for get_iplayer

Today I managed to get access to a Windows XP desktop and thought I’d try out the latest get_iplayer Windows Automated Installer. I have to say I am really quite impressed. The Installer is maintained and put together by Simon Dible. I just downloaded it, ran it and it automatically downloaded and installed all of the get_iplayer support packages such as rtmpdump, mplayer, lame, ffmpeg and Strawberry Perl (an open source perl for Windows that is not broken like ActivePerl!).
This really takes all the pain out of using get_iplayer on Windows. I just had to fire up get_iplayer from the Start menu and I had a shell with get_iplayer primed and ready.
The even better part about the new installer is that it now supports get_iplayer updates from the menu, which is good news because the release frequency is higher than the average. The update only usually takes a second or two because you are no longer forced to re-download the whole installer again – only the perl script. I suppose it might be worth looking for installer updates now and then in case you want updated support packages.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

Filed at 9:26pm in iplayer |

17 Comments

  • On March 18th, 2009, colonel32 said:

    Yes, this is indeed awesome, Simon 🙂

    [Reply]
    • On March 21st, 2009, Chris said:

      Seconded – brilliant. Well done and thank you!

      [Reply]
      • On March 21st, 2009, AndrewM said:

        And I’ll third that, very easy and straightforward to use.

        [Reply]
        • On April 17th, 2009, Russell said:

          I’m behind a web proxy at work and this doesn’t seem to install. Is there anything I need to set to get it to use the proxy? HTTP_PROXY is already set.

          [Reply]
          • On April 17th, 2009, linuxcentre said:

            As long as your proxy is in the UK this will work only for iphone mode downloads. rtmp will not work through http proxies – only SOCKS proxies using wrappers like tsocks. You might want to try specifiying your proxy as –proxy=’http://servername:port’

            [Reply]
            • On April 17th, 2009, linuxcentre said:

              Just forgot – sometimes some web proxies filter out some required request headers and therefore will not work so YMMV.

              [Reply]
            • On April 26th, 2009, Russell said:

              I may not have been clear. The problem is that it won’t install if you’re behind a proxy. It can’t download the components. I’ve brought the work pc home this weekend and bingo everything’s installed as I’ve got no proxy at home. Of course the proof will be in the pudding tomorrow when I try running it at work.

              [Reply]
              • On April 26th, 2009, linuxcentre said:

                Ahh.. I see. I’ll inform the maintainer of the installer – I guess the installer does not obey proxy settings. Thanks for the feedback.

                [Reply]
              • On April 27th, 2009, Russell said:

                Great! Well I can confirm that once it’s installed then it works just fine behind the proxy with HTTP_PROXY set

                [Reply]
                • On December 31st, 2009, Davey said:

                  At the end of the installer it stops and tells me to intall something manually(???cygwin)
                  Any idea?

                  [Reply]
                  • On December 31st, 2009, linuxcentre said:

                    Rubn it again – sounds like the download timed out

                    [Reply]
                  • On February 9th, 2010, Pat said:

                    OK, all installed but have NO IDEA what to do next. I want to record Superbowl 44 from BBC iPlayer, Can anyone help an IT caveman???

                    [Reply]
                    • On February 9th, 2010, linuxcentre said:

                      get_iplayer -g superbowl

                      There is a documentation page which has loads of simple examples.

                      [Reply]
                    • On February 10th, 2010, Pat said:

                      Thanks for the reply. I wasn’t sure what to do with your suggestion though.
                      I have now successfully downloaded the BBC iPlayer Superbowl game though via the Web PVR manager and searching through all the available content.
                      I now have 2 copies of the game in my default iplayer folder that was created as part of the installation process, one is Realtime the other is Quicktime. Both seem to work OK.
                      Can you confirm that both of these will still be accessible when the content is removed from the BBC iPlayer at the end of the week?

                      Thanks

                      [Reply]
                      • On February 27th, 2010, hal said:

                        I installed programme but when I try and run it I get the message ‘NSIS error, error launching installer’ Any help welcome.

                        [Reply]
                        • On February 27th, 2010, linuxcentre said:

                          I suggest asking on the get_iplayer forum.

                          [Reply]
                        • On November 2nd, 2010, Jon said:

                          Don’t bother downloading the windows installer. Having used earlier get_iplayer, all this version seems to do is open a few command prompts and do nothing. No idea what is going on. Real shame.
                          Launchine menu “get iplayer” runs a command prompt that simply dumps a load of command line args. WebPVR -> “There was a problem sending the command to the program” – eh ? “run pvr scheduler” spurts out “stuff” followed by “INFO: sleeping for 14397 sec”. Is that it ?

                          [Reply]

                          WordPress Themes