Last week, the BBC made their iPlayer content available for the iPhone, and by doing so they unwittingly made all their content available to download DRM-free as an MP4 stream.
The process is simple; change your browser’s user agent to replicate an iPhone, then you will be able to view and download the mpeg 4 videos.
Download MP4 iPlayer videos in 2 steps
In this example I am going to use wget to download the files via the command line.
1. First you need to lookup the URL for the MP4 stream. The easiest way to do this is to use a web tool that extracts program information from an iPlayer URL (e.g. Eastenders). Paste the iPlayer URL you want to download into the search box on that page and submit, then right-click download the MP4 video and copy the url.
2. Now fire up a terminal and run wget, replacing the URL with the URL you copied from the first step:
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" http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediaselector/3/auth/iplayer_streaming_http_mp4/b0094z1j
An alternative method is to use this ruby script, which takes an iPlayer URL directly and does everything for you.
BBC Reaction
So far the BBC haven’t said a lot about this revelation. Currently, their official line is as follows:
The BBC iPlayer on iPhone and iPod Touch is currently in beta, which enables the BBC to pick up on these issues and find a solution that ensures the content is delivered to users in a secure way before the service is rolled out
According to their technology blog, they will be posting a fuller response in the next few days. My hope is that they don’t do a u-turn on the MP4 format. If any staff from the BBC Media team read this post, here is my message to you:
Dropping the DRM from your mp4 streams for the iPhone is a fantastic step forward, so please embrace it!
Using an open standard will allow license paying users of any platform to enjoy the content they have a right to view, with minimal additional development costs to yourselves.
There is no DRM when people save shows on Sky+ or their video / dvd recorders (or even straight to their computer via a DTV tuner), so why cripple the iPlayer service with it?
At the very least you could make your in-house productions available on MP4 to all, whilst you get the third party producers on board.
Hi.
The following step in your blog is unclear. Where _is_ the download link that you refer to?
All I can see is a URL to the MP4 and no link. Have tried several recent programmes.
“then right-click download the MP4 video and copy the url”
It looks like the iplayer information page I was linking to has changed since I wrote this. Previously it had a direct link to the MP4 url.
If you can, I would strongly recommend trying this ruby script:
http://po-ru.com/files/iplayer-dl
It automates the whole process for you.
If you are using Windows you can install Ruby with the “one-click-installer” from this page:
http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/downloads/
There are also instructions for other OS’s on there.
Although Microsoft suported flip4mac project that allows Windows Media audio and video files to play on a Mac, it has never supported playing DRM-protected Windows Media content on anything besides Windows. Users of BBC iPlayer were limited to Windows.
Luckily current version of MPlayer does support DRM protected Windows Media WMV files. So MPlayer allows you to watch DRM-protected Windows Media WMV videos from BBC iPlayer on Linux / Unix / MacOSX !
Please note that this method doesn’t allows you to watch DRM-protected streaming videos and watch videos with one-time play licenses.