Toby Atkin-Wright

Earlier this week I came across a script called “get_iplayer”; it downloads programmes from iPlayer and converts them into a suitable format to use in iTunes, to use on iOS devices, and to play on an Apple TV. The script has been around for years, but I only found it last weekend.

It’s quite handy; it can display a list of all the programmes available on iPlayer, and can download them based on their name or on a regular expression. It is clever enough not to download the same programme multiple times, unless you tell it to do so, and it can download HD programmes in 720p.

A typical invocation might download all of the episodes of Harry & Paul that are currently available on iPlayer, in the best quality available:

get_iplayer "Harry & Paul" --get --modes=best

It lends itself to automation; I now have a cron job set up to automatically download programmes that I’m interested in, and to pop them into my “Automatically Add to iTunes” folder.

This is a note of what I did to download get_iplayer on my Mac mini; it depends on having the developer tools installed:

1. Install “rtmpdump”, a utility for streaming Flash video files:
   

   git clone git://git.ffmpeg.org/rtmpdump
   cd rtmpdump
   make SYS=darwin
   sudo make SYS=darwin install
   



2. Install “ffmpeg”, a utility that can convert a Flash video file into a plain MP4 file:
   

   git clone git://source.ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg.git
   cd ffmpeg
   ./configure --disable-yasm
   make
   sudo make install
   



3. Finally, download “get_iplayer”:
   

   git clone git://git.infradead.org/get_iplayer.git