June 26th, 2008 by 
Phil
Want an easy way to pass around a long and hard-to-remember URL for a BBC programme?
As of six months ago, and apparently unadvertised, the BBC started providing QR codes for every page in their /programmes section - just add /qrcode to any existing /programmes link.
The page for recent episodes of Doctor Who is http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006q2×0 and so the QR code is available on http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006q2×0/qrcode - the same holds true for individual episodes.
Members of the Future Media and Technology group have blogged about it here and here.
Tagged: bbc, qrcodes | 
3 Comments »
December 30th, 2007 by Phil
There appears to be some work going on to try and get iPlayer working on the XBox Media Center according to this thread on their forums (thanks for the link, Iain) and although it only seems to make progress up to where I did, it does include this comment from Ian Forrester of backstage.bbc.co.uk (a terribly nice chap who I met at XTech 2007 in Paris, and who as it turns out used to DJ at a club I used to go to in Bristol) We’re happy for people to hack around for non-commercial uses.
which is really good to hear.
Additionally, tonight I came across WiidiaPlayer which is built in MTASC, an open-source ActionScript 2.0 compiler written in OCaml
and plays back RTMP streams. Wiidiaplayer is open source and that source is on Google Code. My initial tests haven’t been that successful, but they’ve only been ten minutes long :)
Tagged: bbc, iplayer | 11 Comments »
December 17th, 2007 by Phil
(this was mostly written on Friday 14th December, although no-one else seems to have stepped up to the plate yet)
The new Flash-based BBC iPlayer streams its content over Adobe’s proprietary RTMP, making it very hard to download the stream and save it for later.
There are some native, commercial, applications to do this on Windows like Replay Media Catcher but as far as I can tell, nothing on Linux. There has been a first-pass MythTV integration but this seems to use an embedded browser window.
Red5 is a Java-based open-source Flash server which also comes bundled with some code for a sample client (download the tarball and then look in src/org/red5/samples/client). It might be possible to use this to download the stream; I haven’t yet tested. There also appear to be some code samples in Ruby and Python lying around, but these look very incomplete.
The URL for the stream is along the lines of this:
rtmp://217.243.192.52:1935/ondemand?_fcs_vhost=cp41752.edgefcs.net&auth=SECRET_KEY&aifp=v001&slist=STREAM_NAME
where both SECRET_KEY and STREAM_NAME come from a file of the name http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediaselector/3/stream/check/iplayer?pid=PID where PID is a BBC Programme ID such as b008h3zq as found on http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/ - the base URL for this address is found in the config.xml file linked to from every iPlayer page: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/emp/xml/config.xml
So this looks hackable, with the most promising chance probably being with Java at the moment.
Tagged: bbc, iplayer, red5 | 13 Comments »
