Anti Auntie Ageing Cream

Or: Applications for Keeping BBC Downloads Forever (on Mac and iPod/iPhone).

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A bad start to the post, but it's late, and things can only improve from here in - and they do, at least for UK residents, to whom alone is this post applicable. Sorry, everyone else.

The Beta iPhone iPlayer from the Beeb is quite wonderful: in some ways - visual clarity among them - it's actually preferable to the Mac OS X offering (although this is doubtless partly due to the resolution of the iPhone's screen being more suitable for the streaming service). But a flaw they share is the fact that you can't save a programme once captured, not even for the limited period offered by the Windows version of the service, and certainly not for the virtual eternity available through good old-fashioned DVD burning from the telly or even - dare one say it - a VHS recording.

A quite disastrous state of affairs. If this had been the case in the 70s and 80s, I'd hardly have gained a televisual education at all, so numerous were the programmes of quality that Auntie put out in her glory years (say hello, The Singing Detective in your 2-VHS home-tape-set majesty, viewed voraciously and repeatedly until the tape had just about withered away).

But no more: it may be old news to some, but it's new news (and good news) to me. Beeb Downloader for the Mac, that is.

It's a 'simple' Terminal-with-Applescript-enabled-GUI app, and as such it weighs in at an admirably diminutive 48.4 kb. Instructions for its use (brief though they are, out of necessity) can be found here.

Essentially, you run the app, go to the relevant iPlayer page for the programme you want, and copy the URL (without actually playing the stream) into the app's single, simple window. Then it sets off collecting the data and recording it into a QuickTime Movie file.

And that's it, really. It's a little disconcerting on first use, though, as it gives little or no indication that it's actually doing anything (the minimal app window disappears to be replaced by...nothing at all). There's no way, for example, of seeing how long the file will take to download. It' a bit of a leap of faith at first, and one of uncertain outcome (as leaps of faith by definition tend to be), so for the faithless among you I thought I'd share my first experience of using Beeb Downloader and the nature of the ground that awaited me thereafter.

I decided to try for a one-hour programme (Pop Britannia Part 3 - Two Tribes. This turned out to be a disappointment of a programme, but let's not allow that to get in the way of the greater story). 

I installed (a.k.a. dragged to the Applications folder) the tiny programme, copied the appropriate iPlayer URL, pasted it into the app's window, and chose a save location. Then off it went (literally, as you can't see it doing anything at all except for the clue of the flashing router lights denoting data traffic).

Or, at least, until the flashing router lights denoting data traffic stop flashing, denoting no data traffic whatsoever. In the instant case, this isn't, I'm sure, due to the Downloader application: my broadband connection is notoriously flaky, or at least it would be if its flakiness were known to anyone but myself. (Perhaps this blog will launch its recalcitrance into the public consciousness; who knows.) In any case, Beeb Downloader crashed with an error message whose detail I dismissed summarily without so much as a screen grab. Sorry about that.

After my customarily expletive-laden router-rebooting ritual, I tried to recapture my stream by relaunching Downloader and giving it the URL once more. I chose to save it in the same location as the 175 MB fragment of what it appeared to already have grabbed, and set off. Checking the partial file again after 5 minutes I saw that it had now grown to 199 MB, and crossed my fingers that this meant the app had checked the existing file to see what further data it needed adding to it, rather than start the whole process from scratch.

Now, if it could do this, that would be great, but also somewhat counter to my intuition of what 'streaming' means (uhm, that means it gives you the data in sequential, chronological order, right?); if my hopes were true, this was acting more like a P2P app and grabbing what it needed regardless of where that was in the sequence or timeline. Although, I reasoned back with some conviction, in iPlayer you can jump to a distant point in the programme's timeline and have the stream resync, and you can also restart incomplete downloads of other files from servers that allow it, so it should be ok to do that here...

The technically illiterate argument I was having with myself was abruptly and mercifully ended in favour of the latter viewpoint when the Finder window refreshed itself to replace the QuickTime icon with a thumbnail of the BBC2 logo, and Beeb Downloader began bouncing in the dock. "Have you paid your license fee?" it queried mischievously. 

I had, so I loaded up the 224MB, 484 x 272 25 fps .mov file without even the slightest shiver of guilt. It's just as good as the original streamed file had looked on brief inspection, to these eyes at least. The process had taken about 50 minutes, router downtime included, on the decidedly shabby 1.25 Mbps connection I have in this telecommunications backwater-cum-hovel. I'm sure that the astute viewer can derive from those figures how long it would take to complete the process on his or her own, undoubtedly far funkier, connection.

One quick trip to iSquint and the QuickTime movie was converted to iTunes/iPod/iPhone format without a hitch. (I say 'quick', but in fact this conversion took well over an hour on my aged G4 PowerBook - it'd take about a tenth of that time on a decent modern Intel Mac, though.)

So there it is: I now have both the QT movie file to play on my Mac, and the slimmed-down mp4 iPhone version, available for posterity (although why an army of cockroaches would take an interest in Spandau Ballet I have no idea. Still, it never stopped some people).

Now if the Beeb would only schedule a repeat series of The Singing Detective, I'll have an actual use for the thing.