ffmpeg  get_iplayer  iPlayer  rtmpdump 

Sunday, February 01, 2009

I've always got on very well with iplayer-dl as a means of downloading the iPhone versions of videos from BBC iPlayer. But I recently discovered get_iplayer, which does the same thing with several notable additions:

1. It can download the higher resolution Flash streaming video, not just the iPhone version. The flash version is 640x360 whereas the iPhone version is 480x272.
2. It can download ITV programmes.
3. It can search schedules (so you can use it to find what to download, instead of the iPlayer web page).
4. It feels a bit faster than iplayer-dl, at least for downloading the iPhone versions.

It's the first of these which is most interesting to me. But in order to get get_iplayer to download the Flash stream, you need two additional tools: rtmpdump and ffmpeg.

rtmpdump is used to capture the Flash stream. This is potentially rather handy for other things, so a useful tool to have around. I've compiled a version for Mac OS X 10.5 and put it on the download page.

ffmpeg is, of course, the video conversion tool used in SmallDVD and discussed in many articles on this site. get_iplayer uses it to convert the container format of the downloaded video from Flash to MP4 to make it easier to play (the actual video is H.264, so compatible with both containers).

I realised that the version of ffmpeg included in SmallDVD was actually compiled around two years ago, and is now a very long way from being up to date. So I've compiled a new one and put it on the download page. I also realised that this is the first time I've compiled one of the binaries for SmallDVD since I upgraded to 10.5, and that they are not downward-compatible with 10.4. So for the moment this version is only for Intel & Mac OS X 10.5.

It also made me realise how old many of the other packaged versions of ffmpeg included in other apps are. ffmpegX's version was compiled in April 2006; PunyVid's in September 2006. If you read the news and changelog for ffmpeg, you see that there have been a lot of new formats supported since then, such as the later versions of Flash and WMV. So if you are having trouble getting ffmpeg to read your file, try the latest version.