The coding challenge is over. I’ve proven that It is possible to record the streams of Hulu and 4oD if you are determined enough and use the right open source tools.
I am now officially dropping support and removing the following Programme Type plug-ins:

• Channel4’s 4oD Catch-up
• Channel Five’s Demand Five
• Hulu.com

I like a challenge but at this point I’d rather concentrate on the BBC iPlayer TV/Radio and BBC Podcasts. I’d like to reduce the workload and headache that these other sites cause me! Channel4 – you can stop feeding us that ‘Countdown’ episode now (very good!), and Hulu.com – if it weren’t for Boxee I guess you could stop encrypting the HTML that you serve to stop people scraping your web pages and the massive spaggetti of actionscript decryption functions! I guess many users who want to watch Hulu.com and 4oD programmes will now end up using Bittorrent instead. This is really not quite as ideal for these channels as before, at least with get_iplayer, they could control the geography of where their users were streaming from.

I’m still going to keep the ITV Player plug-in supported as most non-windows users will not have the ability to run Silverlight.

If you’ve downloaded a recent version of get_iplayer you’ll notice that I’ve moved it to a plug-in based architecture. This allows users to write 3rd-party plug-ins. Hopefully this will prove useful if you don’t want to rely on me to add your local channels to get_iplayer. I will attempt to write some documentation on writing your own plug-in. I’ve supplied a plug-in example template with lots of comments to get you started here. You can see the remaining plug-ins in get_iplayer SVN (see the download page) to get some idea of how they work.

Update 6th May 2009: You might want to read this first…

A milestone has been reached today with the addition of Channel 5’s Demand Five service to the list of DRM-free services that get_iplayer can index, search and record. The following are now supported:

• BBC iPlayer TV – up to 3200 kbps HD 720p H.264 / Quicktime / MP4
• ITV player Catch-up / Classic TV – 384 kbps+ WMV / ASF
• Channel4 4oD Catch-up TV – up to 500 kbps H.264 / MP4
• Channel5 Demand Five TV – up to 720 kbps H.264 / MP4
• BBC iPlayer Radio – 128 – 192 kbps MP3 / AAC and Realaudio
• BBC Podcasts – 96 – 192 kbps MP3 / AAC
• BBC iPlayer TV subtitles – SubRip / srt

Supported platforms are: Linux, MacOSX, Windows and pretty much any modern OS that can run perl. See the download and installation pages.

To download and search programmes use:

get_iplayer –type=TYPE <other options>

Where TYPE is either ‘tv’ (BBC TV), ‘itv’, ‘ch4’, ‘five’, ‘radio’ (BBC Radio), or ‘podcast’ (BBC).

For full instructions see the documentation page

Now I’m off for a beer….

Update 6th May 2009: You might want to read this first…
You are now able to search, index, record and watch Channel4’s 4oD without Adobe flash on most platforms using the latest release of the open source get_iplayer. And, best of all – it is DRM free…

This is possible thanks to today’s release of rtmpdump v1.5 by Andrej Stepanchuk which now supports adobe’s obfuscated RTMPE protocol.

To get this working do the following:

• Use the download page to get a new version of rtmpdump and update get_iplayer to the latest version (1.73). (use get_iplayer –update)
• Re-install the new Windows Automated Installer from here – it will then update to a working ffmpeg and rtmpdump v1.5.
• Search for a programme:
  

  get_iplayer –type=ch4 Shameless

• Record the programme that is number 40123 in the resulting index:
  

  get_iplayer –type=ch4 –get 40123

You can also record a programme if you suplly a 4oD url:

• Find the programme on the Channel4 4oD web site and copy the link location of the programme.
• Run get_iplayer as follows:
  

  get_iplayer –pid=ch4:http://www.channel4.com/programmes/shameless/catch-up#2872545

• Or just: get_iplayer –pid=ch4:2872545