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

It would appear that the BBC have started to serve the new High(er) Definition iPlayer streams with the following stream quality:

• Resolution: 720 x 404 pixels
• Video Codec: H.264
• Audio Codec: AAC
• Bitrate: 1500 kbps

I’ve managed to watch some of the content and the quality looks excellent and a marked improvement over the existing 640 x 360 / 800kbps content.

So, to stop all the speculation, yes, it does seem that this new BBC iPlayer HD (well not quite 720p) will be served via the web based flash player.

Also, please update to the newest get_iplayer because flashhigh support has now been fixed after the BBC changed it today.

Update: For BBC HD content please use get_iplayer –vmode=flashvhigh … with get_iplayer v1.47 and rtmpdump v1.4. The fedora, ubuntu, MacOSX and Windows binaries on this site are already at v1.4.
For the programmes that have this new mode available this seems to work mostly reliably now.
Another Update (16/04/2009): You probably already noticed my newer post and that the BBC have released 1280×720 3.2Mbps HD streams now – and that the SD stream is now 832×468 (no longer 720×404) but still 1.5Mbps

Today I managed to get access to a Windows XP desktop and thought I’d try out the latest get_iplayer Windows Automated Installer. I have to say I am really quite impressed. The Installer is maintained and put together by Simon Dible. I just downloaded it, ran it and it automatically downloaded and installed all of the get_iplayer support packages such as rtmpdump, mplayer, lame, ffmpeg and Strawberry Perl (an open source perl for Windows that is not broken like ActivePerl!).
This really takes all the pain out of using get_iplayer on Windows. I just had to fire up get_iplayer from the Start menu and I had a shell with get_iplayer primed and ready.
The even better part about the new installer is that it now supports get_iplayer updates from the menu, which is good news because the release frequency is higher than the average. The update only usually takes a second or two because you are no longer forced to re-download the whole installer again – only the perl script. I suppose it might be worth looking for installer updates now and then in case you want updated support packages.

After some head scratching today I have managed to determine that the new PID which is used to get the rtmp stream URLs is generated by the new, long PID in the format of ‘[64chars]~[64 chars]’ (as shown when get_iplayer runs in –verbose mode). The correct PID is generated by using some keys (in a var called ‘copyrighted_strings’) and AES crypto functions from this flash file: http://www.hulu.com/sec.swf (specifically function ‘dec’). If anyone feels like writing/porting this in perl please let me know.

Today Hulu.com kicked Boxee off their system by, from what I can tell, changing the algorithm/method that is used to determine the playlist PID from the Hulu content-id. This means that get_iplayer will not be able to download Hulu until this is worked out again. I’ve looked at all of the latest Hulu javascript and the algorithm doesn’t appear to be in there. I’m supposing its now done in ActionScript inside the some swf. If anyone has better tools for getting at the algorithms inside of the flash player then please have a go and let me know!

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]