Wednesday, March 10, 2010
I was really disappointed to learn today that Phil Lewis has decided to drop get_iplayer in response to BBC's lack of support for open source software. He explains his reasons here, which are completely understandable. In recent weeks, the BBC have made changes to make it more difficult for open source software to use iPlayer - see the links from Phil's article for more details.
Wednesday, November 04, 2009
One of my biggest complaints about BBC iPlayer is that I vastly prefer watching TV on a TV, not on a computer. So I was pleased to see this article on the BBC Internet Blog describing their plans in this area.
Would this remove the need for me to use tools like get_iplayer to download the programmes? No, probably not, I suppose. Still, interesting to see how iPlayer is evolving.
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
For anyone interested in the details and formats of the audio used by the BBC, this is a fascinating article. It explains the various different stages the audio from The Proms goes through and the format it is delivered in to each channel.
Friday, July 24, 2009
iPlayer Downloader has been updated to be able to handle the higher resolution formats on BBC iPlayer (it previously just downloaded the default). It also allows you to select multiple programmes to be downloaded sequentially.
With these changes, this is very much my preferred way of downloading from iPlayer now.
The current version is Intel-only, but I do now (finally) have a PPC version of rtmpdump which will enable a PPC version of iPlayer Downloader as well. I'll put this on the download page when I get back from holiday.
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
A lot of the visitors to this site seem to be looking for information about downloading and converting video from BBC iPlayer. So I've updated and extended my pages about this. I hope you find them useful - all comments gratefully received.
Sunday, May 03, 2009
There have been several improvements to get_iplayer recently. It can now download HD video from BBC HD (1280x720 resolution, 3.2Mbps), and can also do Channels 4 and 5. So that means it can do all UK terrestrial channels.
Looks like my iPlayer page needs updating - get_iplayer is, without a doubt, the definitive UK video downloader now.
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:
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.
Wednesday, December 31, 2008
The BBC iPlayer was recently upgraded to allow Mac and Linux machines to download files for later playback. Previously you could only stream directly from the server, which I often found would stall in the middle of a programme, making it unusable.
To access the download functionality, you need to sign up for access to the iPlayer "labs", but it's very simple and instantaneous to do this. The iPlayer Desktop app is built with Adobe AIR, and integrates reasonably well with browsing the iPlayer site in a web browser.
The advantages of this approach over downloading files with iPlayer Downloader (discussed here) are that you get a fairly nice GUI for managing the files, and (more importantly) higher quality video. The files I've seen are 640x360, whereas the iPhone versions acquired by the iPlayer Downloader are 480x272.
However... (and it's a big however) they are also infected with DRM encoding to limit playback to a certain time period. This also prevents them being played with any video player other than the iPlayer Desktop. I can't see any obvious way of removing this. ffmpeg is able to report on the file statistics, but not able to convert it. Media Info Mac (which I've just discovered) is also able to read the stats. And none of VLC, MPEGStreamClip or Quicktime are able to play it.
So while it's nice of the BBC to think of us Mac users, it still fails my basic requirement of watching TV on a TV, not a computer (is this really such a strange request???). So I'm sticking to iPlayer Downloader for now. Needless to say, any suggestions on how to remove the DRM, very gratefully received.
Monday, September 22, 2008
[ update 17th Oct 08: there is an easier way to do this now that iPlayer Downloader supports radio programmes. Just use the same procedure described on the BBC iPlayer page to get an MP3 file. ]
EyeTV, which I normally use for recording from DVB, has crashed a few times recently, leaving me with missing episodes from audio series on BBC7.
Luckily, you can “listen again” to everything on BBC7 from the last 6 days. Unluckily it’s all in the stupid RealMedia format. But that’s OK, here’s a way of downloading it and saving it as an mp3 file.
To do this, we need mplayer. SmallDVD doesn’t use mplayer, but Mac users can it from MPlayerOSX. The mplayer binary is buried away deep in the application files at:
/Applications/MPlayer OSX.app/Contents/Resources/External_Binaries/ mplayer_intel.app/Contents/MacOS/mplayer
Then find the URL of the RealMedia stream on the
. It will be something like: http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbc7/listenagain/tuesday/rams/0900.ram
To download the stream as a wav file:
mplayer
curl http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbc7/listenagain/tuesday/rams/0900.ram-vo null -ao pcm:file=output.wav
(note the backquotes)
Then you can convert it to mp3 with lame (included in the SmallMP3 distribution):
lame –b 64 output.wav output.mp3
…although I use SmallMP3 to trim the files first.
Probably no point using a bitrate higher than 64k, as that’s what the RealMedia files were in.
Friday, August 29, 2008
[ update 17th Oct 08: more details about this on the iPlayer page ]
The BBC iPlayer is great, but I want to watch TV on a TV, not on a computer. So here’s a short script to convert video from iPlayer to DivX with MP3 audio so that it plays on my Archos AV420.
First, download the video from BBC iPlayer using iplayer-dl. This gets the un-DRMed iPhone version of the video.
Then use ffmpeg to do a two-pass conversion.
ffmpeg –i inputfile.mov -vtag DIVX -f avi -vcodec mpeg4 -aspect 4:3 -pass 1 -s 640x480 -b 1000k -acodec mp3 -ab 128000 -ar 48000 -ac 2 outputfile.avi
ffmpeg -i inputfile.mov -vtag DIVX -f avi -vcodec mpeg4 -aspect 4:3 -pass 2 -s 640x480 -b 1000k -acodec mp3 -ab 128000 -ar 48000 -ac 2 outputfile.avi
Depending on what it’s playing on you might want to change the aspect ratio and resolution. My Archos is a bit strange about the aspect ratio it displays on the TV, so I force the aspect ratio to 4:3, which is then expanded to 16:9 by my TV.
The iPhone versions of the iPlayer videos are typically 480x272, so I am also doing a bit of upscaling here as well, which probably isn’t necessary. But the result was perfectly watchable on a 32” TV
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