My mum was in hospital for a couple of weeks, and she was annoyed that she’d miss out on Strictly Come Dancing. As it’s a BBC programme, it’s available on iPlayer, but only for a short period of time. The iPlayer route would also mean playing it to her on my laptop via a wireless connection … not an ideal answer. What I really needed was to be able to save each week’s episodes onto DVD so she could watch them on a real telly at her leisure. Surely someone had solved this problem?

The answer was of course they have. The imaginatively named get-iplayer provides a command line tool for downloading an iPlayer programme. It’s a two stage process, but very simple. Each programme has a unique reference number, so it’s a matter of using get-iplayer to search the online catalogue to find the reference number, and then using the reference number to download the programme. It looks like this:

$ get-iplayer | grep -i strictly
Added: 690: Strictly - It Takes Two: Series 8 - Episode 16, BBC Two, Entertainment,TV,Talent Shows, default
Added: 691: Strictly - It Takes Two: Series 8 - Episode 17, BBC Two, Entertainment,TV,Talent Shows, default
Added: 692: Strictly - It Takes Two: Series 8 - Episode 18, BBC Two, Entertainment,TV,Talent Shows, default
Added: 693: Strictly - It Takes Two: Series 8 - Episode 19, BBC Two, Entertainment,TV,Talent Shows, default
Added: 694: Strictly - It Takes Two: Series 8 - Episode 20, BBC Two, Entertainment,TV,Talent Shows, default
Added: 695: Strictly Come Dancing: Series 8 - 10. Week 5, BBC One, Entertainment,Highlights,Popular,TV,Talent Shows, default,
444: Me and My Monsters - 1. Strictly No Pets, CBBC, Children's,Drama,Entertainment & Comedy,TV, default
690: Strictly - It Takes Two: Series 8 - Episode 16, BBC Two, Entertainment,TV,Talent Shows, default
691: Strictly - It Takes Two: Series 8 - Episode 17, BBC Two, Entertainment,TV,Talent Shows, default
692: Strictly - It Takes Two: Series 8 - Episode 18, BBC Two, Entertainment,TV,Talent Shows, default
693: Strictly - It Takes Two: Series 8 - Episode 19, BBC Two, Entertainment,TV,Talent Shows, default
694: Strictly - It Takes Two: Series 8 - Episode 20, BBC Two, Entertainment,TV,Talent Shows, default
695: Strictly Come Dancing: Series 8 - 10. Week 5, BBC One, Entertainment,Highlights,Popular,TV,Talent Shows, default,
$

The one I want is 695, so:

$ cd /tmp
$ get-iplayer --get 695 --modes flashvhigh --force
get_iplayer v2.78, Copyright (C) 2008-2010 Phil Lewis
This program comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY; for details use --warranty.
This is free software, and you are welcome to redistribute it under certain
conditions; use --conditions for details.
Matches:
695: Strictly Come Dancing: Series 8 - 10. Week 5, BBC One, Entertainment,Highlights,Popular,TV,Talent Shows, default,
INFO: 1 Matching Programmes

and away it goes.

Once the programme is downloaded, it can be copied to a dvd. I’ve tried a number of DVD burning programmes, and the easiest to use and most reliable I’ve found so far is ManDVD. Just accept all the defaults – it works for me, but be warned it does take ages.

So, thanks to open source developers, problem solved, and one happy mum.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 31st, 2010 at 9:14 pm and is filed under Open-source. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.