Slash Dot Dash

Rolling on Rails

1. Jon 03.10.08 / 10am

   Wow – that’s some excellent news.

   I also owe you a beer for the download script, which hopefully will mean I can stop rebooting into Windows just to download some TV!
2. Richard Lewis Jones 03.10.08 / 5pm

   The script works a treat. Nice one. A small tweak — change the system line to read:

   system “wget -O #{pid}.mov http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediaselector/3/auth/iplayer_streaming_http_mp4/#{pid}”

   …so the rename is done automatically.
3. Richard Bowman 03.10.08 / 11pm

   I’ve modified it so it automatically names the file with the title of the programme:

   #!/usr/bin/ruby -w
   require 'open-uri'
   
   IPHONE_USER_AGENT = "Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1A543a Safari/419.3"
   
   def download_movie(url)
     # Get html for movie page (as an iPhone UA)
     htm = open(url, {'User-Agent', IPHONE_USER_AGENT}).read
   
     # Get the pid of the movie
     pid = htm.match(/pid\s+:\s+'([a-z0-9]+)'/i)[1]
   
     # Get the pid of the movie
     title = htm.match(/prog\s+=\s+"\s*(.*)\s*"/i)[1]
     dest = "#{title}.mov"
   
     # Download the mp4 file (uses wget)
     puts "Downloading mp4 file of #{title} (http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediaselector/3/auth/iplayer_streaming_http_mp4/#{pid} to (#{dest})"
     system "wget -O\"#{dest}\" http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediaselector/3/auth/iplayer_streaming_http_mp4/#{pid}"
   end
   
   if ARGV.length == 1
     download_movie(ARGV.first)
   else
     puts "usage: ruby iplayer_download.rb "
   end
   
4. Ben 03.11.08 / 4pm

   Thanks for the updates Richard & Richard, I’ve updated the post with a link to the enhanced script.
5. Ben 03.11.08 / 5pm

   I stumbled across a few more useful resources…

   * “A Greasemonkey script to download Programmes from BBC iPlayer”:http://whomwah.com/2008/03/10/a-greasemonkey-script-to-download-programmes-from-bbc-iplayer/
   * “BBC iPlayer MP4″:http://www.dracos.co.uk/play/bbc-iplayer-mp4/
6. Ben 03.14.08 / 6pm

   The “BBC have ‘fixed’”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7293988.stm the iPlayer so the original method no-longer works. Don’t worry, this has been “circumvented already”:http://po-ru.com/diary/bbc-iplayer-fix-hacked-again/ (“download the Ruby script”:http://po-ru.com/files/iplayer-dl).

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