That's a situation which continues over a decade later. If you watch iPlayer on your laptop, you're stuck with 720p quality. If you want 1080p and above, you need a specially certified device.

Well, that's what everyone thought!

A few weeks ago, I found this curious forum post which said

Yes, iPlayer 1080p is possible, not as simple as just using one of these webUI tools but its certainly possible with youtube-dl and a good look around.. audio_eng_1=128000-video=12000000.m3u8

There wasn't much information about it that I could find. And then I stumbled onto this GitHub issue for youtube-dl.

With a bit of faffing around, I was able to patch my YouTube downloader (/usr/local/lib/python3.9/dist-packages/youtube_dl/extractor/bbc.py) with this code:

for fmt in formats:
   if '-video=5070000.m3u8' in fmt.get('url', ''):
      formats = [
         {'url': fmt['url'].replace('-video=5070000.m3u8', '-video=12000000.m3u8'),
          'height': 1080, 'vbr': 12000,
          'abr': fmt.get('abr'),
          'protocol': fmt.get('protocol'),
          'preference': fmt.get('preference'),
          'format_id': fmt.get('format_id', 'hack') + '-really12M',
          }, fmt]

(To be clear, this is a horrible hack. It changes the iPlayer download function so it only downloads 1080p. It also doesn't rename the file properly once reconstructed, so you'll have to do that yourself. This is a quick hack - not for production!)

And, with that, I was able to download iPlayer in 1080p.

Sadly there's no surround sound - AAC stereo only.

Learning from history

Back in 2008 (!) I was blogging about the BBC's ridiculous decision to restrict iPlayer streaming to iPhones. And in 2012 I blogged about how the BBC's insistence on using Flash had misfired. The BBC (and, to be fair, the video rights-holders) are desperately trying to avoid their content being shown at high quality on "unsanctioned" devices.

I get that they don't want to lose revenue. But anyone with a USB stick can record HD off air. 4K rips of every movie appear on the Internet 5 minutes after they're released. Trying to restrict who can view your content is a losing battle. It only takes one person to figure it out, and then the genie is out of the bottle.

What's the technical overhead of trying to manage this complicated infrastructure they've created? What is the tangible loss if someone watches a 4K stream from their browser rather than the app?

At some point, surely, media companies will have to realise that making easy access to their content is more powerful than blocking off every creative use. Right?

Bah. I'm off to count the pixels on the latest episode of Doctor Who.

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 </pre>

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