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Download HD video from BBC iPlayer with get_iplayer

Download and save DRM-free videos from the BBC iPlayer site with get_iplayer on Ubuntu Linux.

This time last year I wrote a little Zenity GUI application which acts as a wrapper to iplayer-dl, Paul Battley's Ruby application which spoofs the iPhone user agent to download iPhone-optimised videos from the BBC's iPlayer service.

This still works really well, but now that the BBC has added HD content, it's also possible to download this material using a different application, get_iplayer.

Get_iplayer

This is a Perl script that arose around the same time as iplayer-dl, but it has different goals and is a bit more sophisticated than iplayer-dl. But, with sophistication comes complexity, and get_iplayer's command line interface is a bit more complicated.

If you want to simplify the download process, you could also just wrap it up in a Zenity GUI, allowing it to run graphically via a shell script on any Linux system with the Gnome desktop installed.

Installing get_iplayer

On Ubuntu, you can install get_iplayer by typing sudo apt-get install get-iplayer (note the hyphen and not an underscore) or as a Deb file from here [http://linuxcentre.net/get_iplayer/packages/get-iplayer-current.deb].

You'll also need to install flvstreamer, which is in the repositories on Karmic Koala, or install both by entering: sudo apt-get install get-iplayer flvstreamer

The basics

There are quite literally gazillions of command line switches to do various things with get_iplayer. The best way to get a handle on what's possible is to enter 'man get_iplayer' in your terminal to see what the available options are.

To see the list of programmes available for download - radio or TV - simply enter get_iplayer in your terminal. You'll see a huge list of programmes scroll past, and you'll probably need to adjust your scrollback level on your terminal Profile Preferences to allow you to scroll back through them.

Understanding the output

Each line looks a bit like this:

607: Top Gear: Series 14 - Episode 2, BBC Two, Cars & Motors,Factual,TV, default,

The number at the beginning of the line is called the PID, or programme ID, and you'll need this to instruct get_iplayer to download the programme. So, to grab this episode of Top Gear you'd enter get_iplayer --get 607

Just like iplayer-dl, you can also just enter the URL from iPlayer. So to grab Chicken Run, you'd enter get_iplayer --pid=http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00d6ns4/Chicken_Run/

Grabbing HD content

As the BBC now provides iPlayer for a wide range of devices, there are quite a few different formats of video available for download, ranging from the standard Flash (flv) file, to the iPhone version or the HD Flash version, which is the highest quality format currently available and looks really good.

You can specify that you want the HD version by adding --vmode=flashhd to your get_iplayer command, so to grab that Top Gear episode in HD, we'd use get_iplayer --get 607 --vmode=flashhd.