get_iplayer currently does not work (8:30pm 16th Feb). The BBC are having some kind of outage on their iPhone iPlayer service. I am reliably informed that the Apple iPhone cannot get iPlayer either as we speak. It has been down since some time after 16:30 GMT today. I’ll post an update as soon as I hear anything.
I’m not entirely sure if it is related but it also appears that Adobe AIR downloads are somewhat broken also. See this report on the BBC iPlayer forum.
In the mean time, ensure you get rtmpdump installed and you can continue to download and watch iPlayer programmes (unless you use ActivePerl or the Windows Automated installer…).
Update (23:30 GMT 16th Feb):
It seems like the site is slowly coming back – albeit somewhat intermittently.
Update (12:26 GMT 17th Feb):
Apparently the BBC has fixed the problem.

It’s just been pointed out to me the after much waiting, the BBC have started to make AAC streams available for their listen again content on the iPlayer. The bitrates vary from 96 kbps to 128 kbps from what I can see. This will possibly result in better quality. AAC 128kbps can certainly be an improvement over the same bit-rate MP3 but it does seem that the BBC have reduced the bandwidth and quality to AAC 96kbps to save us a whole 32 kbps !! Oh well, you at least still have the choice between MP3 and AAC. Make sure you have rtmpdump installed to be able to download AAC.

In get_iplayer, the default order of trying to download a Radio programme is: iphone,flashaac,flashaudio and realaudio. You can explicitly specify to use AAC mode by using

get_iplayer --type=radio --amode=flashaac [other search options]

After spending many hours playing with wireshark and perl scripting, you can now download Hulu.com closed-captions / subtitles with get_iplayer v1.33+. Since I am in the UK, I had to set up a SOCKS proxy on a US based ssh server. By using:

ssh -D 1080 [server ip]

and then installing tsocks to transparently redirect all network traffic from my system via the US based server, then running up firefox to play a Hulu flash-based movie and clicking the ‘CC’ button, I was able to network sniff for the web requests that obtained the Subtitles. Simple really.

I’ve converted the SAMI subtitle stream to SubRip format because it seems to be the most widely supported subtitle format (see this comparison).

So all you need to do now is run:

get_iplayer --type hulu --subtitles --get [search terms]

Lots of new features have been added to get_iplayer since the New Year. Notably Hulu TV and Film indexing and download support have been added for US based users. This can add up to 9000 additional TV programmes and 200+ films!! Although I have now limited it to the most popular 2000 TV programmes to save on indexing speed.

To list all the programmes available on Hulu you can simply type:

get_iplayer --type=hulu

to get the index. Unfortunately, Hulu do not provide a very extensive XML feed so the indexing can take a few minutes. You can download a programme using the usual syntax, or, if you don’t wish to index the Hulu.com site, you can specify a pid or URL directly. e.g.:

get_iplayer --type=hulu --pid http://www.hulu.com/watch/20727

You will need rtmpdump (see the get_iplayer download page) to be able to download any Hulu programmes.

As usual, this feature is rather new and will have bugs so please let me know if you find any.

Just one other note: If you wish to see all of the options available on get_iplayer you now need to use the –help-long option.

Happy New Year!
For all of those who desperately want to watch UK ITV programmes, get_iplayer (v1.13 onwards) can now download them for you! (just specify –type=itv)

Normally ITV programmes can be streamed in real-time, on-demand, from the itv.com website. However you need microsoft Silverlight to watch them in a web browser. On the back-end itv.com provides these programmes as obfuscated asf (wmv/wma) streams.

get_iplayer scrapes the Catch-Up parts of the ITV site and indexes all of the available programmes. You can then search and download them as you would with BBC iPlayer programmes.

For example,

get_iplayer --type=itv 'Rising Damp' --get

Due to the advertisement breaks, many of the ITV programmes are split into a handful of approximately 15 minute segments. get_iplayer will find all of the segments and download them in parallel. At present I have not found a way to download the segments in anything except real-time so the parallelism means that most programmes only take around 15 minutes to download.

And before you ask – No, I’m not planning on adding 4oD or DemandFive because they use Windows based DRM and I’m not going to play that game. DRM will eat itself.

Update:

get_iplayer v1.17+ now indexes the ITV ‘TV Classics’ programmes in addition to the ITV ‘Catch Up’ programmes. This adds over 300 episodes to the avaiable list.

Update (16th September 2009):

Looks like ITV have completely redesigned their site and back end which has broken the existing ITV plugin. Maybe someone would like to write a new plugin?

Merry Christmas!

Another great feature has been added to get_iplayer. You can now download programmes from the high quality flash version of the BBC iPlayer (640×360 resolution) using the optional rtmpdump tool. This means that you will be able to download ANY programme as soon as it is available on the iPlayer Flash web page.

Andrej Stepanchuk has very kindly written and released rtmpdump. If installed, get_iplayer (v1.04 or above) can use it by adding the –vmode=rtmp option to any TV download. This feature is currently an alpha test.
Pre-requisites are:

• Installation of rtmpdump
• ffmpeg (to convert the flv file into mp4 format)

You can get rtmpdump here (compiled for Linux/x86-32bit, MacOSX/x86 and cygwin). The Home Page and C++ source is here. I recommend you compile your own – it is very easy – just make sure you have the boost libraries installed.

In get_iplayer you’ll need to specify the location of rtmpdump binary (using –rtmpdump) if it is not already in the path.

Let me know how it goes.

Update (28th December 2008)

Andrej has released rtmpdump-v1.1 this addresses issues with 64-bit Linux and adds download resume support. Use in conjunction with the latest get_iplayer 1.05 or newer.

If you come across problems specifically related to rtmpdump (i.e. not get_iplayer) you can post them at the Sourceforge page for rtmpdump.

Update (2nd January 2009)

For get_iplayer 1.09 and above to use the RTMP features you’ll need rtmpdump-v1.2+ this addresses issues with Normal quality RTMP Flash downloads and adds download resume support for this quality.

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.

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. Read more »

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.

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.