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.

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

Erik Huggers, ex-Microsoft BBC Director of Future Media & Technology, has just announced that the BBC, in partnership with Adobe, are building a platform-neutral download client.

It will use the Adobe Integrated Runtime, or ‘AIR’.

Unfortunately, even though AIR is supposed to be platform-neutral, Adobe, in their wisdom have chosen again (as with flash) to prohibit the use of AIR on

…on any mobile device, set top box (STB), handheld, phone, web pad, tablet or Tablet PC (other than Windows XP Tablet PC Edition and its successors), game console, TV, DVD player, media center (other than Windows XP Media Center Edition and its successors), electronic billboard or other digital signage, internet appliance or other internet-connected device, PDA, medical device, ATM, telematic device, gaming machine, home automation system, kiosk, remote control device, or any other consumer electronics device, operator-based mobile, cable, satellite, or television system or other closed system device.

Erik goes on to say: Read more »

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.

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:
Read more »

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 <search term(s)>

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 <search term(s)>

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.

It would appear that the BBC have already made a stream available which looks like the one going to be used in the upcoming N96 iplayer download service. I may have jumped the BBC’s gun here slightly; I used get_iplayer to extract the media stream data for a programme and fed this to vlc (a media player) in Linux and it plays You can even save the stream.
So far there is no need for any white-listed cookies or any User-agent spoofing.
The resolution is not as good as that of the iPhone iplayer version 320×176 compared with the iPhone’s 483×272 but at least its easier to download this one! It will certainly do for mobiles as intended.
I have put full instructions on the Beebhack wiki
I’ve released a new version of get_iplayer which makes this stream information more easily accessible. For example, you can use the following command to get the RTSP url (together with the RTMP flash urls):

get_iplayer –streaminfo 123

Then playback using:

vlc [rtsp URL]

Or save the stream using:

vlc –sout file/ts:stream.mpg [rtsp URL]

Update: I’ve had reports that the stream also works on Realplayer on at least the Nokia N95
Another update: get_iplayer can now download the N96 with the –n96 option
Update: I changes the –n96 option to –n95 (cos that is what the BBC seem to be labelling it as)

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.

Darn, my server crashed quite badly today (web, email, dns, imap – the lot). It ran Fedora6 with Centos5 on Xen. Looks like it was some hardware problem due to possible overheating Maybe it was that additional graphics card I added a few days ago… It caused a whole lot of filesystem corruption and the server was randomly segfaulting and kernel panicking. Anyway, the good news is that the Xen virtual machine which runs the website was very easy to migrate and recover to another server All back up within 4 hours. Now for a newer Linux distro I think and some serious hardware testing I reckon.