March 2008 Archives

Just a note to say that from Tuesday 11th - Thursday 20th, I'll be in Boston, staying at the uber-exclusive Acetarium. I won't be going to Cheers though, as it's basically a tourist trap (and they wouldn't let us sit down to drink last time).

I will also be completing my Moleskine Boston Traveller book. To quote the website:

Boston hosts some of the best historical buildings and sites in the country, as well as many world-class universities. Take a walk on the Freedom Trail to experience sixteen historic sites that shaped American history. The Moleskine Boston, MA USA City Book combines a notebook and city-specific map features into a valuable travel tool.

I love how they qualify 'Boston' with 'MA', as if they'd make a book about the other one.

You should also come to the FSF Associate Members Meeting.

I'm getting a lot of spam comments on here, even with Akismet and other spam filters enabled. I'm going to try a little experimentt for a week - if you want to comment, you'll need either an OpenID or a login with Vox, Livejournal or Typepad.

Also, once you post a good comment on my blog (or at least a non-spam comment), I'll manually add you to the list of trusted commenters, and your post will appear instantly.

Anyway, if you've left a comment in the past, please try and leave a comment on this post, so I can see if it affects things much.

*Please note. This will only work if you're in the UK. *

A bit of background to this. The BBC is funded by every single household with a TV in the UK (except old people). iPlayer is a platform for watching BBC shows you've missed. Initially iPlayer was Windows XP only, and we had a protest about it in London and in Manchester. Then, they released a Flash version, but as Flash isn't free software, users of free software operating systems were still left in the cold. Ashley Highfield estimated there were 400 GNU/Linux users in the UK, and was proven badly wrong.

A few days ago, they launched an iPhone version, even though they've still not released a GNU/Linux version.

You'll need:

• Iceweasel, GNUzilla or Mozilla Firefox
• User Agent Switcher
• Firebug

Finding the stream

Add a new user agent by going to Tools > User Agent Switcher > Options > Options

The first field, Description - enter something useful here, like 'iPhone'.

In the next field, paste this "Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1A543a Safari/419.3" (without the quotes)

Click Ok, and then Ok again.

Head over to http://bbc.co.uk/iplayer/

Bring up a show, and enable Firebug from the Tools menu. A frame will appear at the bottom of your browser window. Click 'Inspect'.

Hover over the player window, in the bottom frame '<object width="512" height="288" type="video/mp4">' will be highlighted.

Expand this element by clicking '+'

You'll see something like "http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediaselector/3/auth/iplayerstreaminghttp_mp4/b00937tc" - copy this.

Downloading

Fire up a Terminal, and type...

wget --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" http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediaselector/3/auth/iplayerstreaminghttp_mp4/b00937tc

Playing

You'll get an MP4 file which you can play in VLC, Totem, etc. No DRM. You might want to rename it to something sensible.

Gnash is a free software plugin for Flash. If you're not already using it, please take this time to download and use it instead of Flash.

Update

Paul Completelymadeupname sends this:

Thanks for the instructions on how to download items from iPlayer. It works really well.

I do have one comment. I notice I'm getting around 300kBps on downloads.

It occurs to me that this download rate is way in excess of the rate an iPhone would pull and might both upset the BBC by stressing their bandwidth,encouraging them to crack down on it earlier than they otherwise might and provide a method of detecting the process.

I downloaded a 30 minute episode of a program and then divided the bytecount by the number of seconds in 30 minutes, coming up with 65062.72 Bps. Assuming all files are the same bitrate, I would like to suggest your command example be modified to:

wget --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" --limit-rate=65063 http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediaselector/3/auth/iplayer/streaming/http_mp4/b00937tc

This will download the file in real-time, as a streaming iPhone would and hopefully not get up the system manager's nose by spawning a pipe-maxing download-fest.

Also, someone else in the comments suggests that the User Agent is not required for the downloads. I would suggest using it anyway, as the iPhone would.

Back from Houston. I have a wife now. A quick one - why do Red Vines taste so good, and yet, Twizzlers, a very similar looking product, taste so bad?

My pal Josh is trying a little experiment with an EP he put out. Get a free download of his record, and if you like it, pass the link on to your friends. His hope is that this will help him get some more exposure, outside of the major label system, which can only be good for everyone in the long run.

My pal Josh is trying a little experiment with an EP he put out. Get a free download of his record, and if you like it, pass the link on to your friends. His hope is that this will help him get some more exposure, outside of the major label system, which can only be good for everyone in the long run.