BBC Iplayer Desktop(UK only) Solved

[viking777]

Has anybody got the Iplayer Desktop application working in Linux Mint? I have successfully got it working in my other two distros (Mandriva and Suse), but I can't get it to work at all in Mint. I get as far as the 'Install Iplayer Desktop' window and click on the 'Install Iplayer Desktop' button but all I get after that is a continually scrolling bar with no internet activity at all. The information bar in the FF window says 'transferring data from airdownload.adobe.com' which is what should be happening (it installs Adobe Air at this point) but it never transfers anything, the bar just scrolls for a very long time and then eventually goes back to the 'Install Iplayer Desktop' button again. That is as far as I can get.

I have tried it with my firewall off but that makes no difference. I have also uninstalled/reinstalled flash-plugin and that didn't help either.

NB this software only works in the UK so if you are not using a UK ip address you won't be able to help.

EDIT: I have no problem streaming programs btw (which tells you there is nothing much wrong with my flash installation) but for several months of the year I don't have the bandwidth to do this so the ability to download would be very useful to me.

[Fornhamfred]

Viking

I have tried to access the Iplayer home page and cannot even get that to display at the moment. As this is a beta release it may be worth trying again tomorrow as I can only assume that the site is down.

I have never had any problems with the standard Iplayer before. (Running Elyssa)

[nick]

Hi

You could try http://po-ru.com/projects/iplayer-downloader/

About
The BBC launched an iPhone-specific version of the streaming iPlayer service in March 2008. As the iPhone does not support Flash video, this variant of the service uses browser sniffing to serve h.264 (‘MP4’) video to clients.
By pretending to be an iPhone, it’s possible to download the MP4 files for offline viewing. You can find out more about the history of this, and of the BBC’s repeated attempts to prevent this, on the Beebhack Wiki.

A lot of the guys on my LUG are using it - I have not tried yet

Nick

[Carl]

I managed to get it working on Ubuntu 8.10 although I already had Adobe Air installed which is what the Iplayer program runs on, so maybe try installing that first? also I had a lot of problems trying to download the actual install file as it kept saying I needed to update my flash which I did via the adobe site and it worked fine after that although at the moment it's hardly worth the effort as the quality is worse than the streaming version and it's only available for some programs Oh and on a side note the best thing to download BBC Iplayer programs is the get_iplayer script, been using it for a while now and the quality is somewhere in between the windows download version and the streaming version

There's some more info on the Ubuntu forums (I'm Kamitsukai )

[viking777]

Thanks for the replies peeps. I guess if I had known about alternatives a while back I would certainly have used them, however I don't really see the point just now as I have the BBC offering working on two out of three distros, it is only Mint that won't co-operate. Therefore although I am using Mint most of the time I have no problem in swiching to another distro when I want to download a program.

As for the quality issues, this is of no concern to me because very often streaming is not a possibility because the bandwidth is not available. In fact I would rather have a lower quality download because, you would hope that it would have a smaller file size.

Thanks for the answers anyway, I wish I had known about the alternatives earlier.

[viking777]

After 4 months I finally have this solved, and how I could kick myself.

BBC Iplayer is only compatible with Gnome and KDE - I use Xfce.

When I logged into a Gnome desktop it worked straight away.

Having said that I can't get it to work on PCLinux, and the uses KDE 3.5.10, but never mind it works on Mint.

[bwjpg]

Has anyone else seen this?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/install/

We are the number 1 supported Linux distro.

When did this happen?

[viking777]

Has anyone else seen this?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/install/

We are the number 1 supported Linux distro.

When did this happen?

I don't know. Maybe somebody from the BBC has been reading this thread!

It isn't me.