So far the BBC have failed to deliver on their promise to produce an OSX and Linux application for downloading content from their online TV site ( http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer ), so non-Windows users have to settle for live streaming in a web browser. Whilst this works fine it does mean that you need to have a reasonable broadband link AND be restricted to watching the limited amount of content that is available through the site ( shows are automatically removed after a few days ).

One developer, Paul Battley from London, has come up with a neat solution to this problem though. When the BBC launched the iPlayer for iPhone site they had to provide a way of displaying videos on a device that did not have Adobes Flash Player, and so re-encoded the videos into MP4 files for display on the Jesus Phone. Paul used this site to create a small Ruby script that allows you to download the iPod playable videos and save them to your computer.

To use the script you first download and extract the tarball, then run two commands to install the libraries and command line script

ruby setup.rb config
sudo ruby setup.rb install

Once you have done this a script called iplayer-dl will be created in the bin directory. To run this you just enter the command :-

ruby iplayer-dl programcode

Where programcode is the last portion of the URL of the program you wish to download. To find this code go to the BBC iPlayer site and click on the program you wish to download. The url will be something like :-

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00dyhs1/Jack_A_Soldiers_Story/

The programcode you require in the example above is the portion b00dyhs1. Once you have entered the command line the script will go away and download the file and by default save it in the same directory as the script. There are a number of commandline options you can use to download multiple files, specify the destination filename and directory and more. To find out more about the options available type :-

ruby iplayer-dl -help

The downloaded files are un-DRM’d and can be played and stored indefinately, which at the end of the day is what the Beeb should have allowed us ( BBC Licence payers ) to do in the first place. After all if I wanted to I could record the program onto my video/DVD recorder and keep that forever couldn’t I ?

Enjoy.