I’m a huge fan of Paul Battley’s iplayer-dl. In brief, it downloads videos from iPlayer by pretending to be an iPhone. The .MP4 files it grabs are suitable for playback on most mobile devices (480 x 272 and stereo audio). It also downloads radio programmes as .MP3 files.
I was having a bit of trouble installing it on my XNAS – running Xebian Linux, so I’ve written this as an aide-mémoire. I hope you find it useful.
Install Ruby and Ruby Gems
apt-get install ruby rubygems
Download and install the latest version of Rake
wget http://rubygems.org/downloads/rake-0.8.7.gem gem install rake
Download and install the latest version of Mocha
wget http://rubygems.org/downloads/mocha-0.9.8.gem gem install mocha-0.9.8.gem
Download and install the latest version of iplayer-dl
wget http://rubygems.org/downloads/iplayer-dl-0.1.19.gem gem install iplayer-dl-0.1.19.gem
Done!
To download a show,
iplayer-dl [pid]
To find the pid, visit an iPlayer page like
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00s0vs1/Doctor_Who_Confidential_Series_5_All_about_the_Girl/
The pid is the weird string of letters and numbers before the episode name. So, in this case, to download the video, you just type
iplayer-dl b00s0vs1
If you want to download several files using only one command, you would type
iplayer-dl b00s0vs1 b123abc bdef456
