Jul 08 2008

New iplayer Site

The BBC iplayer Beta went live late last week. Unfortunately this broke the atom feed support in get_iplayer. As a workaround, that was released on Monday, I am now using the web scraping method again (which is slower). As a side effect of this there is no more channel and category searching support until I can find a better feed. It seems that there are JSON and RSS feeds on the iplayer site but none of these AFAIK can provide a full list of available iplayer programmes. The Apple iPhone uses a new page that relies on ajax/json. I’m investigating how this can be rolled into get_iplayer. As an extra bonus get_iplayer can now download and transcode BBC audio/radio programmes into mp3 format (with the assistance of mplayer and lame). All you need is the radio programme page URL and use the –pid option of get_iplayer.

Tags: ,

Filed at 7:49am in iplayer, Linux |

12 Comments

  • On July 8th, 2008, wm.wragg said:

    Hi,

    I’ve been using your get_iplayer for a while now, and just love it, nice and simple. Since the new BBC iplayer site I have been unable to download any files. I’ve updated to 0.40 but still can’t download anything. I get the following error:

    $ get_iplayer –get b00cgnjr
    Matches:
    129: Doctor Who – Journey’s End, 4 days left

    INFO: Attempting to Download: Doctor Who – Journey’s End
    INFO: Programme is reported as ready for download
    INFO: Checking existence of type Original
    INFO: File name prefix = Doctor_Who_Series_4_-_Journeys_End_b00cgnjr_Original

    ERROR: Bad file download, deleted cookie, please retryng
    $

    It creates a file but it is blank. It briefly flicks up 100% before throwing the above error.
    This happens with any that I try to download.

    Regards,

    Wm.

    [Reply]
    • On July 8th, 2008, wm.wragg said:

      Oh yeah, forgo to say, this same error occurs with 0.38 as well.

      [Reply]
      • On July 8th, 2008, linuxcentre said:

        @wm.wragg, can you run the same with -v option and paste the output here? I cannot reproduce and I really would like to see the verbose output so I can fix (no one seems to be able to so far!)

        [Reply]
        • On July 8th, 2008, linuxcentre said:

          @wm.wragg
          try deleting ~/.get_iplayer_cookies file: ‘rm ~/.get_iplayer_cookies’. Seems that LWP is recreating the bad cookie file after I delete it! I’ll get a fix out as soon as I can figure it out…

          [Reply]
          • On July 8th, 2008, Jeremy said:

            Yes:- rm ~/.get_iplayer_cookies works for me.
            I am downloading Dr Who now.

            [Reply]
            • On July 8th, 2008, linuxcentre said:

              I’ve released a bugfixed version 0.41 – run ‘get_iplayer -u’ to get it…

              [Reply]
              • On July 8th, 2008, Peter said:

                Firstly, thanks for a great script.

                I have had no joy with trying to download a radio show. I have mplayer and LAME installed on Ubuntu and provide the URL with the PID of the show as shown below, to no avail.

                ./get_iplayer -g http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00c8w7q

                Any ideas?

                Many Thanks

                [Reply]
                • On July 8th, 2008, Stephen said:

                  http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00cgq99 doesn’t work –

                  INFO: Programme is reported as ready for download
                  INFO: Checking existence of type Original
                  ERROR: Programme is not yet ready for download

                  Something to do with the fact that it has a “Parental Guidance” warning that must be OK’d first?

                  [Reply]
                  • On July 9th, 2008, wm.wragg said:

                    version 0.41 seems to have fixed the problem. The first time I ran it after the update I got the same problem, but then I ran it a second time with the -v option and it started to work. Cheers for that. Sorry I didn’t get back to you with a verbose listing, if you would still like one I could try again with the 0.40 version?

                    Regards,

                    Wm.

                    [Reply]
                    • On July 9th, 2008, linuxcentre said:

                      @Stephen,
                      The BBC programme page reports that the ‘mp4′ version is available, however it is a lie! Sometimes it is now really ready. The parental guidance doesn’t seem to get in the way in my experience. So if you wait a day or so that programme may be available.

                      [Reply]
                      • On July 9th, 2008, linuxcentre said:

                        @wm.wragg,
                        No problem, I should really improve the bad cookie detection and make it try again automatically. It will fail the first time it detects a bad cookie. A retry will solve the problem in those cases. No need for the verbose trace now. Thanks.

                        [Reply]
                        • On July 9th, 2008, linuxcentre said:

                          @Peter,

                          Try:

                          ./get_iplayer -g –pid http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00c8w7q

                          You need the –pid because there is no index for Radio progs at present.
                          Yes, I’m gonna make this easier in future releases. I’ve got a prototype radio indexing system on the way soon hopefully.

                          [Reply]

                          WordPress Themes