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

Posted by Zonk on from the so-nice-of-them dept.

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."

1 of 187 comments (clear)

  1. How to do this by Cal+Paterson · · Score: 5, Informative
    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.