get-iplayer on Debian 6.0

martin@wimpress.com (Martin Wimpress) — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 18:09:21 +0000

I use get-iplayer to download TV programs so I can watch them on the devices that suit me, when it suits me. What follows is how I install get-iplayer on a headless Debian 6.0 server I have a home. The server in question is really low powered so building from source was not an option.

In order to install the latest version of get-iplayer (currently 2.82) on Debian Squeeze a couple of additional package repositories need enabling.

Enable the Debain Backports repository by adding the following line to /etc/apt/sources.list.d/backports.list.

deb http://backports.debian.org/debian-backports squeeze-backports main

Enable the Debain Multimedia repository by adding the following lines to /etc/apt/sources.list.d/multimedia.list.

deb http://www.deb-multimedia.org squeeze main non-free
deb http://www.deb-multimedia.org squeeze-backports main

Update the repositories.

sudo apt-get update

Install the deb-multimedia-keyring package.

sudo apt-get --allow-unauthenticated install deb-multimedia-keyring

Install get-iplayer (currently v2.78) from the official Debian repositories, this will also install the dependencies.

sudo apt-get install get-iplayer

Install the get-iplayer suggested packages.

sudo apt-get install ffmpeg rtmpdump libdata-dump-perl libid3-tools libcrypt-ssleay-perl libio-socket-ssl-perl

I have seen it suggested that mplayer should also be installed. I’ve not determined if that is an absolute requirement. But this is how to install it on a headless Debian computer.

sudo apt-get --no-install-recommends install mplayer

Finally, upgrade get-iplayer to v2.82.

sudo apt-get install libmp3-tag-perl libxml-simple-perl
wget http://ftp.uk.debian.org/debian/pool/main/g/get-iplayer/get-iplayer_2.82-2_all.deb
sudo dpkg -i get-iplayer_2.82-2_all.deb

At this point get-iplayer should be good to go and the get-iplayer website and man get-iplayer will assist you.

References

PlayStation 3 compatible MPEG-4 container repacker

martin@wimpress.com (Martin Wimpress) — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 17:09:11 +0000

Some of my mobile phones have been able to record video clips in MPEG-4 format. Sadly some of these clips don’t play on the PlayStation 3 and those that do stutter terribly. I use iplayer-dl to download content from BBC iPlayer. Sadly the files are in a Quicktime container and are not playable on the PlayStation 3.

In order to address both these issues I created a script which extracts the audio and video from an existing MPEG-4 or ISO Media Apple QuickTime container and repacks them in a new MPEG-4 container with optional splitting of the resulting MPEG-4 to maintain FAT32 compatibility. The new MPEG-4 files play just fine on my PlayStation 3. This script works on Ubuntu, should work on any other Linux/Unix flavour and possibly Mac OS X providing you have the required tools installed.

MP4-Repacker

iPlayer on Wimpy's World

get-iplayer on Debian 6.0

References

PlayStation 3 compatible MPEG-4 container repacker