Comments on: XBMC BBC iPlayer Plugin

By: Derrick Sanders

Derrick Sanders — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 00:42:21 +0000

The BBC Iplayer is great, but looks impossible to download anything

By: Linuxcentre

Linuxcentre — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 10:16:27 +0000

The mp4’s aren’t actually streamable as you download them, in get_iplayer I’ve had to relocate the ‘moov atom’ at the end of the quicktime stream to the beginning of the downloaded mov file which then makes it streamable before the entire file is downloaded.

By: Jamie Thompson

Jamie Thompson — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 13:39:41 +0000

Sorry I should have been more precise. I run get_iplayer on my (linux) machine to dump the files to a a samba share which my XBMC can see.

The mp4’s that come down from iplayer are streamable in as much as you can play them whilst they’re still downloading

By: Andy

Andy — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 12:31:26 +0000

get_iplayer seems to work with linux installed xboxes only. Can youa ctually stream to xbmc using this ?

By: Jamie Thompson

Jamie Thompson — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 08:31:03 +0000

To be honest. I haven't used the plugin for a long time. I find it much simpler to use getiplayer to dump shows to a share accessible to my xbmc.

By: Duke

Duke — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 13:28:45 +0000

I’m afraid I can’t boast the same success as Matt, I installed the latest scripts but they just generate a few more .py files and do nothing more. Running the script via XBMC simply changes it’s state to ‘running’ for a moment then back again. Any ideas?

By: Jamie

Jamie — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 11:32:40 +0000

take a look here

By: Banjo

Banjo — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 10:56:38 +0000

Thanks for the precise description of the encryption, however what is the decoding algorithm for a file with an odd number of bytes in length.

I’ve come up with the following code fro decryption, but not sure what to do with byte n-403

Is this correct?

(i=0;i++<0×2800;ch=get(*in))
put(*out,ch);
(;i {
ch=get(*in);
i++;
put(*out,ch ^ 0×3c);
ch=get(*in);
put(*out,ch ^ 0×53);
}
if (n%2=1)
{
ch=get(*in);
i++;
put(*out,ch ^ 0×3c);
}
ch=get(*in); i++ ; put(*out,ch ^ 0×53);
ch=get(*in); i++ ; put(*out,ch ^ 0×3c);
(;i++ put(*out,ch);

By: Jamie

Jamie — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 09:35:50 +0000

update: As of this month it appears that even my method will fail. although it is still possible to freely download the mp4 streams, the BBC have started encoding them so that they can only be played on Apple devices. Make of that what you will.

This from http://beebhack.wiki.com

From early June 2008, the BBC changed the mechanism used to encode their videos for the iPhone/iPod Touch. Although downloading via spoofing still works, the downloaded files will not play on any common desktop software. It is possible that a DRM scheme has been applied to the previously unencrypted H.264 video.

A look at the video file headers suggests that the audio is now encoded by libfaac (1.26.1 unstable). Although no DRM scheme has been formally identified, the most likely candidate is Fairplay, which is built into QuickTime and the iPhone.

In fact the DRM appears to be a simple XOR of a large section of the plain vanilla MP4 with a repeating two-byte pattern. Specifically, the first 0×2800 bytes are unchanged, then the next bytes are XOR’d with values beginning 0×3c, 0×53, 0×3c, etc., then the last 0×400 bytes are unchanged. Just to make things interesting the two bytes immediately before the last 0×400 clean ones are XOR’d with reversed values. So (for example) the file is XOR’d with 0, 0,..(0×2800 times).., 0×3c, 0×53, …. ,0×3c, 0×53, 0×3c, 0×53, 0×53, 0×3c, 0, 0, ..(0×400 times)… To recover the original file, just XOR again with these values.

By: Jamie

Jamie — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 09:29:48 +0000

It’s very interesting to see that the official line is no TV no TV license. It has been suggested in various arenas (one of those being the BBC Backstage mailing list) that the introduction of the iPlayer service is part of a plot to enforce TV licences on anyone who has an internet connection. But this obviously isn’t (currently) the case.

Sorry to hear the iPLayer plugin is b0rked. I’ve never really used it since playing around with it initially. I tend to just use a perl script to dump mp4 streams direct to a share accessible by my xbox. With a bit of work the script can also pull down preview images from the BBC programmes service as they use the same naming convention across both services, but i watch so little TV lately that i’ve not really bothered.