Post by nano2nd on Mar 12, 2008 22:01:10 GMT
I've been playing with the BBC iPlayer on my iPod Touch - its quite good and uses the iPod's inbuilt Quicktime player to play the streams. Slashdot reports tonight about how you can use this to access the files from other clients. I thought I'd put together a quick how-to for downloading these non-DRM'd files on your Mac (or Hack). Can't take any credit here - I'm just transposing the Linux examples given to OS X..
Here's the stuff you'll need:
1. Install the user agent switcher for Firefox and create a new user agent called iPhone or something:
2. Install Firebug
3. Switch to your iPhone user agent and go to www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer
4. Select a movie and when you get the Quicktime box in the middle of the screen enable Firebug
5. Click on the Quicktime box and press the "INSPECT" button in the Firebug panel. You'll see it highlight this line of code:
Expand this out and you'll see the URL for the movie file. In this case, an episode of "That Mitchell and Webb Look":
6. Oh, I forgot, you should have downloaded and installed WGET already - copy the executable into /usr/local/bin and the rc file into /usr/local/etc
7. I wrote a little shell script to save my typing in getting the actual file:
The parameter is that URL for the stream you obtained from Firebug - without the URL tags - proboards has put around it above. You'll probably want to rename the file to something sensible after the download.
Here's the stuff you'll need:
- Firefox user agent switcher: addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/59
- Firebug for Firefox: addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1843
- WGET for OS X: www.statusq.org/images/wget.zip
1. Install the user agent switcher for Firefox and create a new user agent called iPhone or something:
Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1A543a Safari/419.32. Install Firebug
3. Switch to your iPhone user agent and go to www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer
4. Select a movie and when you get the Quicktime box in the middle of the screen enable Firebug
5. Click on the Quicktime box and press the "INSPECT" button in the Firebug panel. You'll see it highlight this line of code:
<object width="512" height="288" type="video/mp4">Expand this out and you'll see the URL for the movie file. In this case, an episode of "That Mitchell and Webb Look":
http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediaselector/3/auth/iplayer_streaming_http_mp4/b00937tc6. Oh, I forgot, you should have downloaded and installed WGET already - copy the executable into /usr/local/bin and the rc file into /usr/local/etc
7. I wrote a little shell script to save my typing in getting the actual file:
#!/bin/bash
if [ "$1" == "" ]; then
echo usage: iplayer \<streamURL\>
else
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" $1
fi
The parameter is that URL for the stream you obtained from Firebug - without the URL tags - proboards has put around it above. You'll probably want to rename the file to something sensible after the download.