revford blog
Yellow Wizard shot the food!
Waking The Dead on iPlayer
Wed, 23 Apr 2008 15:24:46 GMT
New series of Waking The Dead on iPlayer now. I missed posting about the first story, but here is number 2, Sins.
Waking the Dead: Sins
Planet of the Ood
Sat, 19 Apr 2008 21:14:34 GMT
Return of the Ood this week, good story with a little sinister foreshadowing thrown in.
Next week we have the return of Martha, UNIT and the Sontarans to look forward to.
iplayer-search
Thu, 17 Apr 2008 01:51:46 GMT
Some new code here, a nice simple tool for searching the BBC iPlayer written in Perl.
Wang in a few terms and it returns links to shows with descriptions.
Usage and results example:
$ iplayer-search Doctor Who BBC iPlayer search results search term: Doctor+Who Doctor Who Confidential: Series 4 - The Italian Job http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/page/item/b009yy2z.shtml Doctor Who: Series 4 - The Fires of Pompeii http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/page/item/b009wzbf.shtml Doctor Who Confidential: Series 4 - A Noble Return http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/page/item/b009v6v3.shtml Doctor Who: Series 4 - Partners in Crime http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/page/item/b009w049.shtml
Grab the code:
iplayer-search
Doctor Who: The Fires of Pompeii
Sat, 12 Apr 2008 19:18:26 GMT
New Doctor Who now on iPlayer. The Doctor and Donna visit the last days of Pompeii, with psychics.
Doctor Who: Partners in Crime
Sat, 05 Apr 2008 21:40:41 GMT
A strange but solid start to the new series of Doctor Who. Mostly this was about reintroducing Donna Noble, played by Catherine Tate as a travelling companion for the Doctor.
Good fun and some great lines, they work well together. I'm still not 100% sold on Donna, but this was a good start.
As a special bonus, also now on iPlayer we have the past three Christmas specials.
Doctor Who: The Christmas Invasion
Doctor Who: Voyage of the Damned
And as this is a double bonus week, we've got two episodes of the behind the scenes show, Confidential, a Kylie special for Voyage of the Damned and the first episode for series 4.
Torchwood: Exit Wounds
Fri, 04 Apr 2008 22:15:10 GMT
A strong finish to a series that felt really watered down at times.
Plot holes you could drive a bus through, but they played it so nicely it didn't matter in the end.
Doctor Who tomorrow...
Auntie's War on Smut, now on iPlayer
Sat, 29 Mar 2008 00:12:05 GMT
No new Torchwood this week, which is a shame, they're saving the last episode of the season for the BBC Two 2100 slot next week.
So rooting about for something to watch, I stumbled upon Auntie's War on Smut, a look at censorship at the BBC, especially in comedy and the people who worked to get around it.
Lots on iPlayer
Sat, 22 Mar 2008 23:33:10 GMT
I've been feeling rough this week, so here is the catchup of good stuff on iPlayer.
10 Days to War
The final two parts. As luck would have it the series is being repeated soon, so if you've missed the first parts keep an eye out on iPlayer next week.
10 Days to War: Failure is Not an Option
10 Days to War: Our Business is North
Torchwood
The move to Fridays means that we have two new episodes this week.
Adrift was good, but like so much of this series seemed to fall a little short. It's like they're having good ideas but fail to really commit to it, so the stories feel too deus-ex-ed.
I've not watched Fragments yet.
10 Days to War, part 6 on iPlayer
Tue, 18 Mar 2008 16:06:07 GMT
Part six of the excellent 10 Days to War is now on iPlayer.
iPlayer on Linux, Mac, iPhone and Windows
Thu, 13 Mar 2008 17:59:45 GMT
The BBC iPlayer is a strange beast.
If you are a Windows user, you get to download shows and keep them for a month.
If you're not, you don't.
If you're an iPhone user, you get a better quality MPEG4 h.264 stream.
If you're not, you don't.
It's a strange arrangement. Providing a very different quality of service for different BBC licence payers.
The downloads issue first, as that covers parts of the other one.
It's all about DRM, that is Digital Rights Management. A system to enforce who can watch content and how long they can keep it.
The content providers who the BBC buy content from want DRM on the iPlayer downloads so people can't keep them. The fear being that if people download and keep shows from the BBC, they won't buy the DVDs as well.
The DRM selected by the BBC is available for Microsoft Windows only.
So the downloads of shows is Windows only for now. But the BBC Trust want this reviewed every six months.
Oh and like all DRM, this DRM doesn't work, you can simply remove it.
The BBC website told me so and what tool use.
So the BBC knows that DRM is worthless. So the deal they made with the content providers is based on the fantasy that DRM'ed files will help DVD sales.
Also, the BBC transmit all programs over the air DRM free in both digital and analogue formats.
So anyone can grab whatever they like from the BBC using a video recorder, DVR, DVD Recorder or any other simple and commonly available system.
So really, anyone who wants can save BBC content in whatever format they like using a selection of tech from the last 30 or more years.
So, why not just make the batter quality stream available to everyone?
While they're at it, let people download them too.
If you're telling Windows users how to remove the DRM, why put it on in the first place.
It's going to save the BBC some work, they only need encode two streams (MPEG2 for Set-tops and MPEG4 for everyone else) and they don't have to spend my licence money on a DRM system that they told me doesn't work.
Reference and Further Reading:
DefectiveByDesign.org
BBC Trust approves BBC's on-demand proposals
BBC iPlayer On iPhone: Behind The Scenes
Quick guide: Cracked DRM systems
10 Days to War on iPlayer
Thu, 13 Mar 2008 13:00:22 GMT
10 Days to War is a series of short dramas about the Iraq invasion.
It's due to run for 8 episodes and the first 3 are on iPlayer now.
10 Days to War
Episodes:
Torchwood on iPlayer
Thu, 13 Mar 2008 12:53:04 GMT
Sinister goings on at the Electro, an old cinema in Cardiff. It's Torchwood.
Useful while it lasted, iPlayer downloads back to Windows only
Thu, 13 Mar 2008 11:32:30 GMT
Well, the BBC have changed something in their setup that stopping my iplayer-download tool working, this means that it's back to streaming only for me, for now.
I'll have a look at getting around this, but I don't see why I should have to.
I'm a British TV Licence holder, I've paid for this the same way as Windows users have, why should I get a lesser service?
And why should I have to fight the BBC website to get it?
They promised this service to us free software users within 2 years, I wrote a script to do it in twenty minutes and they've changed their setup to block it working.
Bad BBC.
iPlayer downloads
Mon, 10 Mar 2008 11:59:47 GMT
I need to point out a couple of things about the iPlayer download script.
First up, not all shows available for streaming are also available for download, it seems mostly random but with a better chance of more recent shows being up there.
If it's not available to the iPhone beta, it's not available to download.
Also these files do not contain DRM, but the BBC wants us to delete files after a month.
This is a way for free software and Mac people to get the same functionality as Windows people, not so we can loot the BBC.
So good people, I'm going to have to trust you to delete the files when you're done.
Please.
iplayer-download
Tue, 03 Feb 2009 17:32:36 GMT
Old and broken code removed.
iPlayer script last tweak for now
Mon, 10 Mar 2008 00:04:09 GMT
Last tiny tweak for now, sorted out to it outputs to a sensible filename.
iplayer-download
Tue, 03 Feb 2009 17:33:03 GMT
Old and broken code removed.
iPlayer download script, cleaned up
Sun, 09 Mar 2008 23:52:04 GMT
Sorted out and cleaned up version of the script. Still calls wget for the work.
Pretending to be an iPhone isn't needed, so I can use LWP::Simple and not have to worry about the more complex LWP::UserAgent.
This trims the fat nicely and makes the whole thing read better.
I'll look at modules for downloading the file within the Perl script, rather than by calling wget soon.
iplayer-download
Tue, 03 Feb 2009 17:31:51 GMT
Old and broken code removed.
iPlayer download script
Sun, 09 Mar 2008 21:06:34 GMT
Okay, this is still a quick hack, but it works. Perl this time, should run on anything sensible.
It claims to be an iPhone, reads the show page, grabs the iPlayer ID, then calls wget to download it.
I'll work on this more later, but it's a working tool for now.
iplayer-download
Tue, 03 Feb 2009 17:31:01 GMT
Old and broken code removed.
iPlayer IDs
Sun, 09 Mar 2008 19:37:47 GMT
Seems I'm not exactly right on the iPlayer IDs. These don't always match.
I'm working on it...
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