[paperclipmonkey]

And so, as the bbc said, the cat and mouse game starts...
We were told a while back by cubicgarden, an employee at BBC, that if we wanted to he could arrange a meetup with the Iplayer Development team.
I think now that we have a client (and with a small bit of work, working again) we should show off the platform and try and persuade them to stop this idiotic game.
Persuade them to use some kind of non rtmp flash stream and XML standards, so we can easily scrape their site without wading through HTML.
If non proprietary flash works for everyone else why not use it. Sure there will be people downloading occasionally, but these streams will never be a good quality as dvb rips on torrents, the bbc just doesn't have the bandwidth.
Or maybe I'm just an idealist..

[johnsto]

The latest version of the script now works again.

[paperclipmonkey]

Wicked!
I don't think i've told you how much I appreciate this, thanks for looking at the bug report I sent!

[carlosp_uk]

Hi

Just to repeat what's already been said, this is a GREAT script - and thank you for it! Totally great to be able to do this.

Until it's actually streaming it's slightly limiting having to wait so long for the downloads, but this doesn't detract from the brilliant script. I really look forward to seeing how the code develops in terms of the video plugin, streaming ability and so on.

This may even inspire me to create a windows media center extension for iPlayer, if one doesn't already exist!

C

[Strawp]

High fives all round

For those wanting a file dump rather than a GUI, my script also works ( http://www.strawp.net/files/download/iplayer_dl.zip PHP based) as does this one: http://po-ru.com/diary/bbc-iplayer-fix-hacked-again/

[TheBoxMan]

Thanks for that. I've had some progress now :-D

I see the script - it loads.

I can browse catagories, it finds episodes by reading the pages (it gets there eventually).

In the lower left hand corner is an error:

Code:

error onControl exceptions Type Error.

Every show I've attempted to run is showing:

Code:

Download Failed
episode not available as an MP4 yet, sorry!

Debug info following the error shows:

Code:

"...\default.py" line 378, in onControl
action0

Doesnt' seem to be the source of the problem reading the debug as far as I can see though.....Looks like the problem is occurring when the program is trying to visit an address............

Anyone else experiencing this?

Also is there a way to stream these rather than download them?

Thanks folks!

[johnsto]

TheBoxMan, can you please try the latest version and let me know if that fixes it.

Also, just to confirm, you ARE in the UK, aren't you?

[TheBoxMan]

Cancel what I said before errors are gone now that I've got the new version (had a spot of catching up to do on the recent developments. I've been out of the loop due to exams).

Three questions:

1. Can I set it to save to a samba share?(as while I have a decent size of HD my father's Xbox is being used mostly for streaming and he only has the original hard disk (tiny!)

2. When can we set this streaming? and what technlogical obsticles have we got to overcome? (I'm guessing that the lack of a streaming feature is down to some barrier we've hit?)

3. Anything an absolute rookie who's more likely to riddle your code with bugs than anything else can do to help? :-D

[TheBoxMan]

and yes I'm uk :-)

[johnsto]

1. Can I set it to save to a samba share?(as while I have a decent size of HD my father's Xbox is being used mostly for streaming and he only has the original hard disk (tiny!)

I have no plans to add this, partly as a nod to the BBC's iPlayer guidelines and to honour their agreements with content providers.

I'm using it on my original, tiny HDD too!

2. When can we set this streaming? and what technlogical obsticles have we got to overcome? (I'm guessing that the lack of a streaming feature is down to some barrier we've hit?)

It seems only the iPhone is capable of streaming MP4s from the BBC website - no one has had any luck streaming to VLC, mplayer or anything else. It's still being investigated.

The workaround would be to download the MP4 in the background and hand off to XBMC once a few megs have been grabbed, but this throws up its own hurdles, and given that mplayer on my PC can't read a truncated iPlayer MP4, I'm not convinced this approach would work either.

3. Anything an absolute rookie who's more likely to riddle your code with bugs than anything else can do to help? :-D

Send me cake!

[TheBoxMan]

I have no plans to add this, partly as a nod to the BBC's iPlayer guidelines and to honour their agreements with content providers.

I'm using it on my original, tiny HDD too!

Original HD...poor you :-) How do you coap with not being able to have a few million tracks or a few hundred movies on it? :-)

Why would not saving to samba shares be any worse for the BBC than downloading the MP4's in the first place? *scratches head*

Once we've got the files getting them off the Xbox can be done by samba or FTP anyway.....

It seems only the iPhone is capable of streaming MP4s from the BBC website - no one has had any luck streaming to VLC, mplayer or anything else. It's still being investigated.

Sounds interesting. Might try packet sniffing while my friend streams to his ipod touch (which can also do this) over our wireless network and see if it shows up anything. (though it's probably been tried by loads of people before ).me.

The workaround would be to download the MP4 in the background and hand off to XBMC once a few megs have been grabbed, but this throws up its own hurdles, and given that mplayer on my PC can't read a truncated iPlayer MP4, I'm not convinced this approach would work either.

This is an interesting conundrum.

Send me cake!

If you're near Edinburgh you're more than welcome to come and collect :-P

In the meantime I suppose I'll have to try and find the time to get to learning my python - eventually I'll get enough time off. It's been a hectic year.

[johnsto]

Why would not saving to samba shares be any worse for the BBC than downloading the MP4's in the first place? *scratches head*

Think of it as intentional inconvenience to dissuade people from abusing the system (although you are correct it doesn't stop them - I have no desire to walk into that war!)

Sounds interesting. Might try packet sniffing while my friend streams to his ipod touch (which can also do this) over our wireless network and see if it shows up anything.

I have a feeling it's just a feature of QuickTime, nothing special packet-wise.

[Strawp]

johnsto - this could do with some caching so you don't have to fetch pages of TV shows repeatedly

[johnsto]

johnsto - this could do with some caching so you don't have to fetch pages of TV shows repeatedly

I've just submitted a few changes including session-only caching support and a slightly quicker scraper so you might want to give that a try.

[Strawp]

I will do first chance I get, cheers

Discussion on this thing is all over the place and people are replicating each others work so I've created a wiki: http://bluwiki.com/go/Beebhack

Please contribute, link back to your project and add anything you've learnt!