Tuesday 21 October 2008

State of play

Firstly - Air Sharing is still free !

With each upgrade this app is getting better and better. I know a lot of you like having as many apps as possible on the iPhone, but for me finding the ones that will do as many functions as possible is the key.
So I'll continue to support this app for some time to come. Mainly due to its ability to view video and audio in the same package. Where MxTube (at the moment) is falling down is the screen estate given to video descriptions. This is OK for occasional youtube vids, but with multiple episodes of the same tv series, they are hard to differentiate (not to mention the xml cludgery to get the videos listed).
All in all, the ipl2iph script will only be updated for "air sharing" for now.

Secondly - The SUDO problem.

Was looking to make the scripts run as mobile and added some support for this. Unfortunately I couldnt get all the functionality I wanted as mobile without adding an entry to the SUDOERS file. This was too much of a risk (both for security and the filesystem) for the average / inexperienced user. Also the SUDO package was no longer installed by default by Cydia, so some new users experienced problems initially.
So the answer for now is that SUDO has been written out of the scripts, making the change of user to root, to run the scripts essential.

Thirdly - BBC Radio arrives on iPhone

Some of you may be aware that the iPlayer website now serves radio to the iPhone. In conjuntion with the Beebhack team I / we looked into the process and Paul Battley made a slight adjustment to his script (iplayer-dl) to faciltate the mp3 downloads.
So just visit the entry for the desired radio programme on the iPlayer site, hit refresh and run the script as per usual.
If you havent updated iplayer-dl in a while - using winscp / finder etc. go to /usr/bin/ and delete iplayer-dl. On next run of my script it will be automatically updated to the newest version.
Adjusting the script to make the mp3's go to a radio folder is next on my todo list.

Lastly - Accessing BBC iplayer from outside the UK.

I get a fair amount of questions regarding this issue. As a BBC licence payer I value the service the BBC provides but dont always agree with their distribution methods. But I have from time to time, been known to download BBC content from abroad.

Best Method - UK Based VPN, without a doubt the easiest and most reliable. Unless your employer provides such a service, you are going to have to part with cash for this. Personally I pay about $10 a month for a 3 way vpn access i.e UK , US & Canada.

UK Based Proxy - works ok, but if its a free proxy it will either be slow or unavailable a lot of the time. My script will work with a UK based proxy (but you will have to dig inside the script and comment/uncomment the correct lines).

The download speed through the proxy method can be increased though. After some intense experimentation whilst outside the UK, it has been proven that the BBC doesn't geo-check the download stage, only the authentication stage.

Looking for beta testers on this method - comment below to sign up - will review on a case by case basis. I've seen people charging for the information above, which I find abhorrent as they donate nothing back to the BBC.

Anyway newest version of ipl2iph - for "air sharing"

Cheers

14 comments:

megadude said...

hey, I'm in the USA for about a month, I'll we happy to beta anything you have relating to iplayer! Running osx, mac book pro/iPhone 3g

Anonymous said...

hi matt, please send me an email to ipl2iph (at) googlemail.com

Gavin Birmingham said...

Hi mate,

The link to download the latest version of ipl2iph does not work. FileFactory says

"Sorry, there are currently no free download slots available on this server."

Could you put up another link for this download and possibly include a quick guide for getting this working.

Thanks again,

keep up the good work!!

Gav

fl3tch said...

just keep trying - i just downloaded it now.

you need a jailbroken iphone with cydia installed. I recommend air sharing app for playback (its still free). Copy the script to the /usr/bin directory on the phone and set permissions of 0777.

The script will install all the requirements on first run. Instructions and video are posted below.

cheers

Gavin Birmingham said...

Hi man,

I copied the ipl2iph script to iphone and ran "cmd line thingy" it installed all the stuff I needed from cydia. (a good improvement).

Also this appears to be downloading no problem over 3G. I can download a 230MB file in about 25 mins. Which is not bad. Plus with background program I can run the download in the background as long as I don't respring.

Many thanks.

My email is gavbrum@gmail.com

Please keep me up to date with any improvements or changes to this script.

I would be willing to do any testing and report back with results if needed.

Cheers again.

Gav

wesbar said...

Hi. I've noticed that recently ipl2iph has stopped working. I think that the BBC has changed something cos there was a new version of iplayer-dl released on the 27/11 to combat this. Is there any chance you may get time to update ipl2iph? Thanks.

fl3tch said...

If you havent updated iplayer-dl in a while - using winscp / finder etc. go to /usr/bin/ and delete iplayer-dl. On next run of my script it will be automatically updated to the newest version.

This will work whenever iplayer-dl is updated.

cheers

FinTech tip said...

Fantastic! Is there anyway to get round the fact you need to be in wireless mode to do this tho?

fl3tch said...

Even though you cannot start the download from the BBC's site on 3G - hit refresh - fire up ipl2iph and the download will go ahead over your data connection. (use at your own risk, regarding your data allowance !)

Cheers

Graeme Robinson said...

This looks like it should be a great app, but I'm having an issue with it that nobody seems to have commented about...

I ran the script as root, and everything has installed (ruby, iplayer-dl, etc) but when I try to download, I get an error "no programme identifier specified", this is probably due to the message above "Converting /var/tmp/SuspendState.plist to XML" as I would think looking at the video that this should convert to the mov filename?

Any ideas what I have done wrong?

Thanks

fl3tch said...

You need to hit the refresh/reload icon on the address bar for the programme to get locked in to the suspend plist - it's mostly the BBC's javascript problem ie choose programme (wait for the play arrow to show up) - hit refresh and then launch the script ... Let me know how you get on .....

Graeme said...

aha, I've got it to work, yet to try to play back the video as I'm at work, but I'm sure it'll work... The thing that I was doing differently was that I was launching the iplayer site from a bookmark on the springboard, if i launch the site by opening safari, then navigate to the site by typing the address it works :)

I'll try to narrow it down to something like opening safari by a bookmark, or the bookmar url not being bbc.co.uk/iplayer (it has /mobile/ somewhere in there). I'll let you know when I find out more.

Thanks for the quick reply, and well done on the script.

Graeme Robinson said...

I'm not sure how useful this is, or whether you're very bothered about why it wasn't working, but I'll post it here just in case...

I've narrowed it down to the address that I was going to for the iplayer site. My bookmark pointed to http://bbc.co.uk/mobile/iplayer/? it turns out that if you first navigate to the iplayer using that address, the script doesn't find the movie id. Changing my bookmark to http://bbc.co.uk/iplayer makes the script work every time.

Thanks

Graeme

Anonymous said...

Dont know if this is a new thing but when I try to navigate the iplayer pages on iphone and then lock in the uid, the url automatically changes to include mobile which then stops the iplayer-l from working as it cant find the