If this post is a little off topic for you, please bear with me, there will be another post about theology, mission and work with young people along in a bit…
If, like me, you sometimes need to get hold of recent news footage (in my case for Visual Intercessions – images of recent events are very useful), or just simply to archive the latest Dr Who episode (I believe I have everything from Dr Who on that backup hard disk of mine) or maybe watch Question Time later when you don’t have an internet connection, then get_iplayer is the business. It is a multiplatform series of tools to grab a given iPlayer file and save it to .mp4 or .mp3 files (if it is radio). You can get it from here. In the modern age, this is the equivalent of keeping video tapes: it’s for personal use only and anyway, my license fee has paid for this – I’m a part owner of it.
The toolkit is very techy, which doesn’t worry me, but it intimidates a lot of people, who just want a nice frontend in Windows.
So I started messing around with AutoIt – a very nice Visual Basic-like scripting language and constructed this:
All you have to do is cut and paste the URL from iPlayer into the box, tick it if what you are wanting is a radio programme rather than the default telly and click the button. It does open up the program in a little box, but it just makes the downloading a bit smoother.
You can download the frontend as a ready-compiled little program from here. Note: Revised Link which now works directly. I also include the source code in there if you want to see how it is done: it’s not complex, it takes the content of what you paste in and writes it to a batch file and executes it (thus saves you the time of getting the ‘spell’ right). Download it, put it in a folder in your documents folder, right click on it and “pin to taskbar” or “pin to start” and then run it. It’s simple!
AVG Antivirus False Positive!
Our Office computer has AVG Antivirus on it and it has just thrown up a virus alert on my beautifully crafted (and virus free) program. I know it is virus free, and I wrote it on a machine running Avast and tested it on a machine running McAfee. Thankfully, I am not the only one to encounter this problem: AVG has a problem with false positives with AutoIT. Please see this thread here: http://help.lockergnome.com/security/AVG-problem-AutoIt-scripts-stop-AVG-false-positives–ftopict11559.html
It does not have a virus in it.
Thank you – that’s brilliant. No more lost programs when iplayer screws up (lost a bunch of “Father Brown” and “Farewell to Canterbury” when the client said I had three weeks left to view them).