Windows 10: BBC iPlayer

Hi there
@cereberus

I wouldn't use the Ubuntu ppa as this isn't so often updated as the actual program.
The "manual" install is actually very easy - you can cut and paste the instructions. Note also the 18.04 LTS final will be out in a few days too so the ppa's will have been "frozen" presumably a while back.

Current version is 3.13 --- the previous version 3.12 doesn't fill the cache (can be useful ) and some other distros go back to V2.98 which is broken since the Beeb changed the way it handled programs. Version 3.12 can still download using the pid but I'd prefer the most current version of this program. Forget about the GUI version -- you need to install a lot more stuff --it's easy to search for what you want using the standard BBC iPlayer and getting the pid from the URL in the BBC iplayer when you've found the program.

Download history is usually in a hidden file starting with a . (full stop) in your download folder in your home directory. If you need to re-download a program just delete the entry from this file --saves messing around with Force and override options. !! Also you can copy your download history to a spreadsheet.

To re-name / re-order files / tracks etc etc use the excellent mp3tag program on Windows
Mp3tag - the universal Tag Editor (ID3v2, MP4, OGG, FLAC, ...)

or for Linux a similar program is Puddletag has a .deb for easy Ubuntu installation.

Puddletag - Awesome mp3tag-like Editor For Linux ~ Web Upd8: Ubuntu / Linux blog

easy to install and looks (and operates) just like the windows mp3tag





Cheers
jimbo

 

I am not really interested in keeping a history. I just download files and move to my separate video drive. I looked in the perl script to try and change download location, but it was way beyond my paygrade.

Good advice for those who are interested.

 

Ubuntu may not be of much interest here, but that statement is COMPLETELY untrue. It is always updated when the upstream distribution is updated. Having used it for 5+ years, I know the facts on this.

You are confusing PPAs with the main Ubuntu repositories. It doesn't even make sense to "freeze" PPAs.

Also completely wrong. @cereberus already knew where to find it, but for the record the download history is in a file named "download_history" in %USERPROFILE%\.get_iplayer ( $HOME/.get_iplayer on Linux), not in your download folder (whether that is in your home directory or not - it's on your desktop by default on Windows).

Baffling. You would almost never need to re-download, but if you do, it's a lot easier to just add --force and/or --overwrite to your command than to find a file, open it in an editor, find the record of interest among possibly hundreds, delete it, save the file, exit the editor, delete the previous file if necessary, then go back to your command prompt and enter the command that could already be running.

 

That is what the --output option is for. There is copious documentation to be found:

get-iplayer/get_iplayer

However, if your video drive is a network drive (or slow USB), it may be best to move the files yourself as you already do. BBC video files can be 2GB/hr for the highest quality, and get_iplayer reads and writes the full content multiple times when converting and tagging, so that can be slow going to/from a network drive.

 

Thanks for this. I see documentation for --output shows directory names in Linux format - it failed first time when I put in a Windows path, because I used single quotes. I tried double quotes and it worked perfectly .

 

That's a restriction of cmd.exe - only double quotes actually quote arguments. get_iplayer itself does quite well at working the same on Windows and Linux, but the command shells are rather different.

 

Yeah - I kind of guessed as much.

 

Hi folks

@cereberus

using the get_iplayer app on Linux the download files are by default stored :





As for download speed I'm usually getting around 125 Mb/s for TV programs - and around 75 Mb/s for radio -- I download the 4 episodes of "The City and "The City" (I like those sorts of programs) very quickly just recently

Running this on a Linux VM.





I then move after download to a shared network data drive which is in a RAID 0 Array (2 X 6TB HDD). I play these on a remote TV with an amazon fire TV box with Kodi installed on it. No need for any media streaming stuff on the server - just play on the client devices e,g laptop, TV etc. KODI also will play native DVD iso's with menus too if you still have those and rip to ISO with programs like AnyDVD.

- speed perfectly OK from HDD. I do back up the RAID 0 data regularly but the HDD's are reliable enough.


Cheers
jimbo