Life on the bleeding edge 2 – get_iplayer

Features

• Downloads MP4 streams from BBC iPlayer site with better quality than Flash player streams
• Downloads Flash AAC/MP3 and WMA streams for radio programmes
• Allow multiple programmes to be downloaded using a single command
• Indexing of all available iPlayer programs
• Caching of Index (default 4h)
• Regex search on programme name
• Regex search on programme description and episode title
• PVR capability (may be used from crontab)
• Full HTTP Proxy support
• Runs on Linux (Debian, Ubuntu, openSUSE and many others), OS X (10.5+) and Windows (XP/Vista/7/8)
• Requires perl 5.8.8+ with LWP module

There are several ways of getting get_iplayer, and the current version is 2.86 and the current version is 2.83-1 in Debian "Jessie" -

Method 1

wget https://raw.github.com/dinkypumpkin/get_iplayer/latest/get_iplayer

After downloading the script make it executable -

chmod 755 ./get_iplayer

and then place it in an executable path like $HOME/bin or /usr/local/bin.

The first time you run the script it will create a settings directory ~/.get_iplayer and download plugins. It will then access the BBC website and create an index of all TV programmes currently on iPlayer.

Method 2

But this is my preferred way

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#!/bin/bash
set -e
#: Title                : getbuild
#: Date                 : 23 April 2014
#: Version              : 1.0
#: Description          : To make it easier to get get_iplayer, and then keep it up to date
#; Requirements         : atomicparsley rtmpdump id3v2 libid3-3.8.3c2a git
#; Possible requirements  : flvstreamer libwww-perl libxml-simple-perl perl libmp3-info-perl mplayer ffmpeg libav-tools
# Copyright (C) 2014, 2015, 2017  Sharon Kimble 
log=~/logs/getbuild.txt-$(date +%Y%m%d-%R).txt
exec > >(tee -a $log) 2>&1
echo "$(date +%Y-%m-%d\ %H:%M:%S)" >> $log

### First run
cd $HOME/git
git clone https://github.com/dinkypumpkin/get_iplayer
cd $HOME/git/get_iplayer
sudo cp get_iplayer /usr/local/bin
cd ~

### Second and subsequent runs
#if [ -d "$HOME/build/get_iplayer/" ]
#then
#    echo;
#else
#   mkdir "$HOME/build/get_iplayer/"; cd ~ ; echo;
#fi
#cp /usr/local/bin/get_iplayer $HOME/build/get_iplayer/get_iplayer-$(date +%Y%m%d-%R)
#cd $HOME/git/get_iplayer
#git pull
#sudo cp get_iplayer /usr/local/bin
#cd ~

To use it, make it executable and then place it in an executable path like $HOME/bin or /usr/local/bin.

The first time it runs it will download the current git repo, and then copy get_iplayer to /usr/local/bin after prompting you for your password. Then you can just use it exactly the same as the packaged version from your repo.

For second and subsequent runs, uncomment section 2, and comment out section 1.