[Scottish] BBC iPlayer for Macintosh but not for linux, for a long time, if ever . . .

[Alan Pope]

On Mon, Feb 11, 2008 at 12:45:44AM +0000, William Anderson wrote:
> Also, iPlayer works great under Linux using the streaming service.  How 
> zealous do we all want to be just to download massive video files and 
> keep them for 7 days?
> 

I actually have a use case for it at the moment. I have fast broadband at 
home but none at my weekly residence at work. I'd like to be able to use 
iPlayer to legitimately download TV programmes from the previous week to 
watch whilst away from home. Pretty reasonable given the Windows people can 
do this.

I thought I'd have a go at running iPlayer under XP in a QEMU VM and it 
worked very well for downloading. Playback under the vm is somewhat sucky 
though. Of course I could use some nafarious tools to break the DRM on the 
video to allow me to play it on the host but it's then getting messy.

Shame really, as you say the streaming service works fairly well. I suspect 
that the protocol used to deliver the stream will be reverse engineered and 
put in a firefox extension before long (AIUI they [downloadhelper] are 
already working on it), and long before a native Linux port of whatever is 
needed to make things legitimately downloadable is available.

Cheers,
Al.