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.

The Web site access has not been optimised for the iPhone interface so to actually select the programme you require involves a fair amount of zooming and panning of the page. Hopefully this is a short term thing and the Beeb will improve the front end for easier navigation. What I can say though is that the video actually looks superb on with not stuttering or pixellation what so ever.

If you have an iPhone or iPod Touch head straight over to http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer for preview. If you are interested in the technology behind this new service there is a blog article at the BBC Internet Blog that explains the approach being taken to encode and produce the iPlayer versions of BBC programmes that is also worth read.

There are of course a number of sites that have good collections of rare and bootleg MP3 recordings some of which are shown below. These are largely soundboard or FM radio recordings rather than the typical poor audience recordings so they are usually well worth the time to download.

The Ultimate Bootleg Experience
Bootleg Browser
Soundaboard
Quality Boots

This is obviously a small collection, please feel free to drop a comment on this post if you have any other suggestions.

This looks like the perfect accompaniment to an evening in with friends… Check it out.

PS. It does video as well… Check this one out for a classic example. Another good one here MusicisLife

The really nice feature about Veoh though is the ability to download videos and play back with the downloadable player software. The software is available for Windows and Mac and acts as a video library, download client and player. The player looks very Mac/Vista like with a slick polished black interface and has a full screen mode for TV like playback.

To download videos you must first download and install the player software. Once you have done this clicking on the download links next to each video on the web site queues the video up for offline download in the Veoh player software. Once the file has fully downloaded it will appear in the library section for you to select and play.

Overall the solution works really well and offers a practical solution for anyone trying to find a way to download and playback old TV series and viral videos. As an example I am currently watching Series 1, Episode 1 of Red Dwarf the cult science fiction comedy from BBC TV.

[tags]veoh, video, tv, player, free[/tags]