BBC Offers iPhone Version of iPlayer, Accessible to Linux Users Too

smallfries writes "After a long battle with Linux users in the UK, the BBC was forced into releasing a flash version of the iPlayer streaming service to fulfill their obligations to license-fee payers. After claiming that development of Linux and Mac versions of the iPlayer would take two years, Auntie Beeb has rushed to support the iPhone. iPhone users 'can be trusted' because their platform is locked down ... so the beeb opened a non-DRM hole in the iPlayer to support them. This was guarded by the extreme security of User Agent strings! Long story short, Linux and Mac users have made their own non-DRM, non-Microsoft platform from firebug and wget. UK users can now watch (and keep) their favorite BBC shows."

Comments

Re:Fortunately...

[Firehed]

You know that Windows users can fake a user agent string and download the DRM-less movies too, right?

I hope that the UK DMCA doesn't apply to me...

How to do this

[Cal Paterson]

1. Get Iceweasel/Firefox and the extensions User Agent Switcher and Firebug
2. Use UAS to switch your browser's http user agent string to "Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1A543a Safari/419.3" (you'll have to add this as a new option through the menus)
3. Go to the BBC video web page; here's an example
4. Open the firebug tab; Tools > Firebug > Open Firebug
5. Use the search bar to search the HTML tab for video/mp4
6. You should find a tag like "object width="512" height="288" type="video/mp4" Expand it.
7. Copy the http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediaselector/3/auth/iplayer_streaming_http_mp4/* URL to the clipboard
8. Use wget to fetch it, using the command "wget --user-agent="Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1A543a Safari/419.3 http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediaselector/3/auth/iplayer_streaming_http_mp4/*"
9. ???
10. Profit.

Re:Fortunately...

[TheRaven64]

It's actually easier to 'exploit' on the Mac. Just go to Safari's debug menu (Developer if you are using the 3.1 betas), set the user agent to 'Mobile Safari 1.0' and you get the iPhone version of the site. Then you can just right click on the videos and select save. Another nice benefit is that the H.264 version uses about 25% of the CPU of the flash version so you won't have fan noise in the background when you're watching videos on a laptop.

Re:How long?

[RalphSleigh]

Yes they do use windows DRM, but they also make sure that their customers are educated on all sides of the issus

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6944830.stm

Various tools have been created to strip files of the DRM, such as FairUse4WM, a program released in August 2006 by a hacker named Viodentia. Nine days after the crack first appeared, Microsoft released a new version to prevent FairUse4WM from working. Within three days hackers released a new version of the tool. The tool can be used to strip DRM from programmes with the BBC iPlayer.

Re:Flash sucks.

[TheRaven64]

Flash is not a standard, it just has a lot of implementations. H.264, in contrast is a real, documented, standard. Having tried the H.264 and flash versions on the same machine, it's quite obvious why Apple wanted to use it. The H.264 version takes about a quarter as much CPU power to decode. On the iPhone, which has a hardware decoder chip for the format (as do quite a few mobile devices), the difference will be more pronounced.

Re:How long?

[Angostura]

Not really - it is known as "Aunty' or 'The Beeb'.

Re:Fortunately...

[Shisha]

Because for each tv owning household in the UK pays the BBC over 100 pounds a year.