Good news! get_iplayer v0.46 now indexes, searches, downloads or streams all BBC podcasts. Just use the –type=podcast or –type=all option to enable this. The podcasts appear to be in either mp3 or aac format so no transcoding is required.

Version 0.42 of get_iplayer was released today. It has some nice new features. Below is an overview of some of them:

• Channel specific atom feeds from iplayer site are now used; this has the benefit of being faster to download the indexes and (I think) gives a better indication of availability. The downside to this is that there appears to be less programmes available. Also the BBC have a bug in their feeds – they report availability date as being before the programme was even made in some cases!
• All Radio programmes are now indexed. Just use –type=all or –type=radio to enable this. These are downloaded from the RealAudio streams and transcoded to mp3 on-the-fly for ease of use and for uploading to your mp3 player.
• All configuration, cookies, named pipes and cache files are stored in $HOME/.get_iplayer/ (remember to re-save your defaults using the –save option)
• You can now exclude specific channels and categories from your searches using –exclude-channel and –exclude-category options

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.

Thanks to the BBC’s new Atom feeds for programme availability, I’ve been able to integrate this into get_iplayer to make indexing and searching the programmes faster and more functional. You can still use the old web scraping method (–scrape) if this doesn’t work well for you Just ensure you flush the cache when you run this version for the fist time (–flush). New functionality in the future will allow searching by channel, availability date, and category. Watch this space…

Me doing my super-quick presentation at Mashed ’08

photo credit: Ben Dodson comments: Full kudos to this guy – He announced that he’d managed to rip out the H.264 stream from the BBC iPlayer in front of the BBC development team and management with the line “it’s not technically allowed but I’ve done it”

My hack was to get the Python based PVR, Freevo, to play iplayer programmes without having to download them in advance. (Yep, kids keep bugging me to download the latest episode of Blue Peter on the Linux xbox!).

The hack allows the Freevo user to browse all of the iplayer programme listings which get_iplayer has obtained from the BBC iplayer web site. It sorts it by programme name to make this task quicker.

The H.264 (mp4/quicktime) files from the iplayer site (intended for the Apple iPhone) are of higher quality than the flash and Wii alternatives. Watching them on a full-sized TV can actually look very good quality.

The user can then simply select the programme and watch it. In the background the programme is also saved to disk for watching at a later date should you not watch it all at once.

Downloading of the programme resumes as soon as you start watching the programme again (the resumed download goes faster than the streaming rate).

The streaming from the iplayer site is made possible by first downloading the Quicktime moov atom which contains the video stream indexing info and is unfortunately located at the end of the file, munging it and moving it to the beginning of the file so that mplayer, xine, etc can play it back before it is totally downloaded.

I’ve now posted the new version of my get_iplayer perl BBC iplayer downloader script here. Also there are the iplayer Freevo plugin and get_iplayer Freevo wrapper script which includes installation instructions.

See the beebhack wiki for may more details of the H.264 download workrounds.

Just got back from Mashed ’08 and Wow – what a blast! This was the first 24hr hack-fest (geekathon?) I have been to and thoroughly enjoyed it. I must admit that I am surprised I could manage the 40 hours without sleep! I met a number of very interesting and cool individuals there. I did a presentation of my hack and I’ll post shortly on that.

OK, I give in! I now have a blog. I’ve been resisting this for 9 years now.
I conceed that writing pages in simplistic html using a text editor probably
looks way too ugly these days Maybe in another 9 years I will get a Facebook account also.