They stole our revolution

BBC iPlayer is great. Except:

• if you dislike Flash
• if you’re a Free and Open Source Software user
• if you’re out of the country on business
• you prefer the command line
• you’re a militant license-payer who believes you should have the same basic freedoms you had twenty years ago when you used betamax tapes to record this stuff

I recently set out to get better quality downloads from iPlayer, based on hints from a colleague.

I used to use po-ru get-iplayer ruby script, but that doesn’t cater for the higher-resolution versions as far as I know. get_iplayer does better, there’s a version on github or the seemingly more up-to-date version at infradead. Grab a copy thusly:

git clone git://git.infradead.org/get_iplayer.git

(Don’t have git? On a Mac? Get homebrew, then brew install git)

Turns out there’s a few dependencies – flvstreamer, ffmpeg, and rtmpdump. Mac homebrew users, you can make short work of those by brew install flvstreamer, brew install ffmpeg and brew install rtmpdump. You should then be all set.

There’s more information at the original get_iplayer page, on github, but this works for me:

get_iplayer

(gives you a list of the various programmes … pipe through grep if you’re looking for something in particular)

get_iplayer –info 123

(gives you more detail about a particular programme, including a list of video modes it’s available in)

get_iplayer –force –get 123 –vmode=flashvhigh1

(will download a specific programme at the specified resolution, regardless of whether you downloaded it before or not)

Don’t settle for the poor default streaming quality or iPhone quality. The beebhack wiki has a comparison table of the different resolutions. Note that the AppleTV struggles with the highest resolutions, so if that’s your target you might want to use flashhigh instead of flashhd.

Note there’s something of an arms race going on, as the BBC tries to block the freetards from doing this sort of thing. Feel free to pitch in to the get_iplayer project to support it with code or documentation to ensure we can continue to consume our content how we like, where we like.

Also – please don’t use this if you’re not a UK TV License payer. It’s only because of the unique way the BBC are funded that they are able to provide such excellent content. I can only hope that in future years we’ll be able to use our license ID to unlock access to this content from anywhere in the world, without advertising.

Related posts:

1. links for 2008-03-14
2. Who stole my voice?
3. So true
4. Vic and Bob’s favourite distro
5. Hmmm, upgrades