Comments on: BBC iPlayer Coming to a Mac Near You

By: DeanDMX

DeanDMX — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 11:48:29 +0000

I don’t want to be smug or anything but I told you so…

By: Dan

Dan — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 08:16:41 +0000

@dn: The latest Flash video is MP4 (or rather h264) – how can that be crappier than, erm, MP4.

By: Dave P

Dave P — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 13:32:15 +0000

“iPhone and iPod touch owners make-up for 3%”

I wonder how much of this is due to the download scripts.

By: BBC iPlayer coming to Mac…and maybe to other countries - Apple Gazette

BBC iPlayer coming to Mac…and maybe to other countries - Apple Gazette — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 08:25:27 +0000

[...] more interesting part of the TAB report I was reading about this, is that there is talk in the BBC about opening the iPlayer up [...]

By: dn

dn — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 01:56:00 +0000

I’d recommend the perl script over the ruby one, the ruby one is over complicated now since they made it something you have to install and have a gui for.
Perl script just stick it in a directory, made it executable and its all selfcontained, no throwing trash around all over your OS

By: Paul Battley

Paul Battley — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 22:17:34 +0000

Jack, that XOR business was a red herring. When a client doesn’t imitate an iPhone closely enough (by not grabbing a bug image), the file served is partially XORed. The solution was just to improve the emulation.

By the way, here’s a direct link: http://po-ru.com/projects/iplayer-downloader/

By: Jack H

Jack H — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 14:45:56 +0000

“Of course, the episode files are sure to have some kind of DRM embedded within them — the BBC has an awful lot of red-tape to go through and that can make for clunky solutions to simple problems”

Funny thing is the iPhone and iPod Touch compatible MP4 files contain almost no real DRM at all, just a simple XOR scheme and a some minor obfuscation to the actual location of the files on their servers. You can use the following ruby script to download DRM free files straight from the BBC:

http://po-ru.com/

By: dn

dn — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 14:24:12 +0000

I just use this

http://linuxcentre.net/getiplayer/installation/

higher quality mp4s instead of crappy flash video

By: DeanDMX

DeanDMX — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 00:07:38 +0000

Word on the street is that Adobe Air will be the platform agnostic solution. I’m not sure if Air supports DRM or not, but it seems like an OK solution to a big problem.