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

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!

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]

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.

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.