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 🙂

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 »

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)

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.

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…