townx - Ruby Tuesday: miPlayer is some iPlayer Ruby shizz for Linux - Comments

Technically, my fault :) I

elliot — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 14:12:08 -0500

Technically, my fault :) I should have included an empty /downloads directory inside the zip file. Unfortunately, I had created this file, but because it was empty it was left out of the zip by the archiver program (I think). I've rectified this now.

re: Threads

Kevin — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 03:03:18 -0500

Actually, my fault. My script assumes you want to save to '/downloads'. Removing the threads gave me an error which said so. Threads now work fine. thanks.

Hello Kevin. Probably me

elliot — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 17:38:00 -0500

Hello Kevin. Probably me doing something wrong with threads (I'm not too hot on those). My suggestion would be to look at iplayer-dl.rb, around line 169. Take out:

t = Thread.new {

and

}

    t.run

a bit further down. This means you won't be able to do multi-threaded downloads (I don't think, anyway), and may have to wait for the download to complete before you can go to another page. But it might be a fix. Long term, could be a case of making Ruby threads work properly in the app..

thread killed?

kwe — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 16:53:35 -0500

looks really interesting, under OSX I get the following error..

http://pastie.textmate.org/private/tyt9itit4uqajwe0sg7eia

any ideas what I need to look at?

Ruby Tuesday: miPlayer is some iPlayer Ruby shizz for Linux

elliot — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 18:32:11 -0500

Update: Paul's code is MIT licenced, so I'm putting mine out under the same licence.

A while back, I wrote some simple scripts for parsing the BBC iPlayer search pages, so I could get emails about programmes I was keeping an eye on. I also wrote a little Rack server interface so I could browse my search results easily. The downer was that I could only watch them online as downloads aren't supported on Linux, so I ended up having to go to the BBC website to watch them in a tiny window, or boot my Windows VM to download a DRM-crippled version.

However, Rob Styles noted today that there's a Ruby script out there (http://po-ru.com/diary/keeping-up-with-iplayer-dl/ by Paul Battley) which mimics an Apple iPhone, enabling you to download programmes as MP4 files without DRM. I don't have an iPhone, but I can't see why it should only be design know-it-alls who get this privilege. So I integrated that script with my Ruby/Rack web front end, spiced it up a bit, and away I go. I can now search for programmes and download the mp4s to my hard disk (if they exist - not every BBC programme has an mp4 version). Nice. Turns out Rack can also multi-thread in a decent fashion (unlike Rails), so I can even have several downloads running at once.

The code is attached. There's no licence on the download script I'm using, so I hesitate to release it under any kind of open source licence (yet). I'll contact Paul and find out what licence he's releasing under. I made a few modifications to his script to wrap it in a class for use in my app., but not many. See my previous entry (linked at the top of this post) for proper instructions/installation etc..

Also, please don't expect very clean, well-tested code here: it's something I've thrown together for my own use, and I'm putting it out there for others to use if they like. Also, I can't guarantee it will work on Windows at all. Enjoy.