Linuxcentre » iplayer

BBC Local Radio Support in get_iplayer

Phil Lewis — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 17:53:18 +0000

I just noticed today that the BBC Radio Audio-on-demand (aod) for BBC Local Radio has at long last been integrated with the iPlayer. Although there still only appears to be RealAudio streams for these local radio programmes at least get_iplayer v1.03 can now index them and get the information for a consistent set of XML feeds.

So now you’ll notice over 3000 radio programmes from 56 BBC radio stations in the get_iplayer index!

As ever, RealAudio streams will be transparently transcoded to mp3 format unless you choose to disable this behaviour.

Don’t Want to Miss that Programme on iPlayer over Christmas?

Phil Lewis — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 14:27:39 +0000

You know how it gets over the Christmas period; busy visiting relatives and friends, drinking and partying. The last thing you remember to do is to watch that crucial episode on iPlayer within the minute window of seven days the BBC has kindly granted you.
Now is the time to set up get_iplayer to act as a PVR (you know Sky+, TiVo, series-link, etc, etc)! get_iplayer can be easily configured to automatically download your favourite BBC TV programmes just like any other PVR except that there are no limits on how many programmes you can ‘record’ simultaneously (OK, except your broadband speed maybe). You even get seven days grace when you’ve forgotten to setup the PVR.

Here is a quick guide to setting it up.

I’m assuming you have downloaded and installed get_iplayer as described here

Setting up a PVR Search

Use get_iplayer to search for the programme you wish to have downloaded. You can search based on the programme name (and can also limit to specific channels and categories etc). In my example I want to get the upcoming TV episodes of ‘Doctor Who‘ so I just type this:

get_iplayer ‘Doctor Who’ --type=tv

This results in:

Matches:
184:    Doctor Who Confidential: Series 4 - A Noble Return, ‘BBC Three’, Factual,Arts,Culture & the Media,TV, default
185:    Doctor Who Confidential: Series 4 - The Italian Job, ‘BBC Three’, Factual,Arts,Culture & the Media,TV, default
186:    Doctor Who Confidential - At Christmas, ‘BBC Three’, Factual,Arts,Culture & the Media,TV, default
187:    Doctor Who: Series 4 - Partners in Crime, ‘BBC One’, Drama,SciFi & Fantasy,TV, default
188:    Doctor Who: Series 4 - The Fires of Pompeii, ‘BBC One’, Drama,SciFi & Fantasy,TV, default
189:    Doctor Who - Voyage of the Damned, ‘BBC One’, Drama,SciFi & Fantasy,TV, default

OK, so I don’t want those extra programmes on BBC Three, so I limit my search to ‘BBC One’ only:

get_iplayer ‘Doctor Who’ --type=tv --channel=’BBC One’

Now I just get these matches:

Matches:
187:    Doctor Who: Series 4 - Partners in Crime, ‘BBC One’, Drama,SciFi & Fantasy,TV, default
188:    Doctor Who: Series 4 - The Fires of Pompeii, ‘BBC One’, Drama,SciFi & Fantasy,TV, default
189:    Doctor Who - Voyage of the Damned, ‘BBC One’, Drama,SciFi & Fantasy,TV, default

Now I have the search I want, I can save this to the PVR search list by simply appending the --pvradd option:

get_iplayer ‘Doctor Who’ --type=tv --channel=’BBC One’ --pvradd=’Dr Who’

If you want to list all the searches that you have saved just run:

get_iplayer--pvrlist

If you want to do some more advanced searches you might want to read this guide for examples.

Getting the PVR to run Automatically

There is one more thing you need to do to get the downloads to happen automatically. You only need to set this up once. You must ensure that this command runs on your PC on a regular basis:

/path/to/get_iplayer --pvr

In Unix/Linux systems this can simply be achieved by adding the following lines to your crontab (run ‘crontab -e’). Also, if you have local email delivery capability then you will also receive an email when a programme is downloaded (set MAILTO below accordingly):

MAILTO=”myemail@mydomain.com”
0 * * * * /path/to/get_iplayer --pvr 2>/dev/null

This will ensure that the PVR checks for new matching programmes every hour, on the hour.

It might also be prudent to add these options as defaults on your system so that you don’t get the Sign Language version by mistake and also so that you know where the downloaded files will be saved:

get_iplayer --output=’/home/jbloggs/videos/’ --version-list=default --save

And finally, remember that this will only work when your computer is booted up and connected to the Internet

get_iplayer working with MythTV plugin

Phil Lewis — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 11:33:44 +0000

I’ve just been contacted by Richard Ablewhite who has recently updated his excellent iPlayer MythTV plugin MythVodka that now uses get_iplayer.

You can see a slightly older version of it running on this youtube video which gives you an idea of how well it works. The streaming capabilities do seem to be very slick

You can download the plugin from this site

Let us know if you get it working.

get_iplayer 1.00 released

Phil Lewis — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 13:37:14 +0000

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: Removes programmes that have already been downloaded from listings and searches.

I will also try now to update freshmeat.net with new releases.

Is your broadband connection too slow for BBC iPlayer?

Phil Lewis — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 19:21:59 +0000

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 and rebuffering resulting in a very annoying experience.

get_iplayer will just download the H.264 quicktime version of the programme at your broadband speed so that you can watch it after it has downloaded. Yes, this even works if you have a dial-up modem - should you be so desperate!! (it will even resume downloading when you redial after your connection drops)

The PVR options of get_iplayer will also take the pain out of having to wait while programmes download - it will download your favourite programmes as soon as they become available.

New BBC iPlayer Mobile uses WMV with DRM

Phil Lewis — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 19:40:08 +0000

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 is better than I reckoned it was. One test report suggests that the resolution is 320×240 which is a marginal improvement over the 320×176 I reported as available 3GP/H.264 for the Nokia N95/N96.

The other good news is that the 3GP/H.264 feeds still seem to be available even though these do not appear to be official in any way. You can see these URLs from get_iplayer using the ‘--streaminfo’ option listed as ‘Nokia N96 h.264 low quality stream URL’.

To restrict what you can do with the programmes you have funded, the BBC has opted to employ ‘OMA DRM 2 specification’ which, incidentally, Apple does/will not support. So I guess that is why we still have those higher quality iPhone ~~download~~ streams available. The OMA DRM 2 spec only appears to be currently implemented (supported?) on closed source players and platforms (correct me if I’m wrong here).

For a one interesting legal evaluation of DRM (in easy-to-understand terms) see this link

get_iplayer RPM and DEB packages now available

Phil Lewis — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 23:53:49 +0000

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 if there are any problems with these.
Note that the --upgrade option of get_iplayer is probably not the best idea if you choose to use RPM and DEB versions.

get_iplayer has new BBC iPlayer PVR functionality

Phil Lewis — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 15:56:59 +0000

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 channel, category, version(i.e. Signed or Default), date added, programme name, episode name, description etc.

The PVR searches are saved in ~/.get_iplayer/pvr/. You can Add, Delete and List the PVR searches. You’ll need to run a single command from a scheduler such as the Unix cron daemon (or possibly
the Windows scheduler).

Examples of usage are as follow:

Add a new PVR search (using any usual search options):

To automatically download all BBC One comedy programmes:

get_iplayer --pvr-add=bbc1_comedy_tv_progs --category=comedy --type=tv --channel=’BBC One’

or, to automatically download the ‘Click’ TV programme:

get_iplayer --pvr-add=click --type=tv ^click$

or, to download all of Chris Moyles podcasts:

get_iplayer --pvr-add=moyles_podcasts --type=podcast moyles

List the PVR searches already added:

get_iplayer --pvr-list

Remove a PVR search:

get_iplayer --pvr-del=bbc1_comedy_tv_progs

Run the PVR (this really should be added to your scheduler such as cron):

get_iplayer --pvr

See the Readme file for more information on usage.

Improved ‘Sign Zone’ Programme Support for get_iplayer

Phil Lewis — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 22:34:18 +0000

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 signed. If you want to list just the programmes that are signed then use this:

get_iplayer --versions=signed

You can also specify that a signed version of a programme be downloaded in preference to a default (i.e. not signed) programme by changing the versions preference list as follows:

get_iplayer --version-list=signed,default --get

Also, if you prefer not to have any signed programmes downloaded you can specify that only default programme versions are downloaded as follows:

get_iplayer --version-list=default --get

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

Phil Lewis — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 02:16:23 +0000

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 the iPhone. The MP3s are 128kbps stereo 44.1kHz - better than the rather sad 64kbps realaudio streams we had before. Shame there are no ID3 tags yet - come on BBC
For reverting to downloading the realaudio streams in get_iplayer you must use the --amode=realaudio option.

Other New features in get_iplayer lately are:

A download history is now maintained which prevents the accidental re-downloading of programmes that you may have deleted
Ability to see which programmes have become available since the last cache refresh
The --since option which allows you to see programmes added to the cache since a number of hours ago
The --list [channel|categories] option which displays a unique list of categories and channels for the specified type of programme

Try using the get_iplayer --help option to see all new options.

Update v0.75:

get_iplayer will now automatically try to download the MP3 radio stream and then fallback on RealAudio streams.
In radio mode --amode=realaudio option will prevent mp3 streams being downloaded
In radio mode --amode=mp3 will ensure that no RealAudio is downloaded - i.e. it disables the default fallback to realaudio
--force-download will make get_iplayer ignore the download history

Another update: Classical music appears to be encoded at 192kbps and speech at 80kbps.