TV Doesn’t Get Any More Digital Than This

Rick put me onto this via a post to the TLUG list recently: get_iplayer. I had previously been using iplayer-downloader to download iphone versions of bbc tv and radio programs from iplayer despite not having an iphone. I feel that being a license-fee payer I should be able to have the same access to BBC content as other license-fee payers and should not be descriminated against just because I don’t have an iphone and use Linux.

Whilst still on my mac mini I used iplayer grabber quite often instead of iplayer-downloader. It is based upon the iplayer-downloader ruby script but uses an OS X native GUI interface to make it easy to let you visually select the programs that you want to download. Not as good for scripting regular behaviours so as to make an internet based PVR but much nicer for browsing to the odd program that you missed, or chancing serendipitously onto something new.

get_iplayer is more like iplayer downloader but is aimed at the other U.K. terrestrial tv channels as well rather than just the BBC. This makes it easy to use as a proper internet PVR (with the usual restriction of course that not everything that has been broadcast is necessarily available.). Download and installation is as simple as:

$ wget http://linuxcentre.net/get_iplayer/get_iplayer
$ chmod 755 get_iplayer

Whilst usage is also straightforward:

$ get_iplayer

gets you a list of all programs available

Otherwise you can search by title:

$ get_iplayer coast

Which retrieves a list of programmes with a title containing the word ‘coast’. These can then be downloaded by code:

$ get_iplayer --get 129

or name:

$ get_iplayer --get 'coast'

Obviously there are plenty more options for controlling how and when you download programmes in the documentation.

Addendum #1: Using the long description is a really useful way to search through the extra data associated with available programmes:

$ get_iplayer –long gadgets

will search the long descriptions of programmes for the term “gadgets”. Also the –info argument returns extra information about the file containing the programme.

Addendum #2: Channels 4 and 5 are no longer supported (and if you are on an earlier version then it looks as though channel4 are blacklisting the IP addresses of get_iplayer users even on the regular service — way to go channel4). That said if you have flvstreamer or rtmpdump installed then you can now get hold of (kind of) hi-definition bbc programmes:

$ get_iplayer –info ’springwatch”

will tell you what versions are available. Then, for example:

get_iplayer --get --force --vmode=flashvhigh2 --flvstreamer=/home/simon/apps/flvstreamer/flvstreamer_x86 --ffmpeg=/home/simon/apps/ffmpeg-0.5/ffmpeg 609

to download programme 555 in very high quality flash mode using the external flvstreamer application and ffmpeg to convert the flv to mp4 after downloading. Notice that I have had to download new versions of flvstreamer and ffmpeg and compile them to get the required functionality — the versions from Ubuntu repositories were not new enough at this point. This is why the absolute paths to each application are supplied so that those particular versions are used. My existing version of ffmpeg worked fine for the other tasks that I used it for and I didn’t want to risk disrupting that which is why I am using specific versions purely for this task rather than installing them system wide.

Also you can download specific versions of bbc programmes for mobile devices. Whilst the iphone version was the first you can now get programmes encoded for the Nokia n95 (which should be fine for the N810 users), e.g.

$ get_iplayer –vmode=n95_wifi –get 555

Although I found that it is easier and quicker to reencode the standard programme download using tablet encode as I wrote about here.