Hello, I've just signed up to ask this question, after using get_iplayer for a few years.

Since all the changes the BBC instigated last week, is it now impossible to record live TV? It doesn't seem to work even through the command prompt. If I try the command from the documentation, all I get is this:




Is it now impossible to record live TV, and should i just give up, or is there a way to actually get it working? Before the changes, I never had any problem recording live TV.

Great program, though. Keep up the good work! :)

It looks like the BBC have killed the RTMP TV streams. They moved the live streams on the web site to Adobe HDS a little while ago, so no surprise that they eventually killed the old streams. get_iplayer may get HDS capability at some point, but no promises. At the moment, there are bigger problems to fix, and live streaming is low priority. For now, you may be able to cobble together a recording solution with live streamer and VLC (I haven't tried it though).

http://livestreamer.tanuki.se/en/latest/

https://github.com/chrippa/livestreamer/issues/529

As they have already done this for the live TV streams and are planning to do it for radio catch-up in 2015, I'm guessing that TV catch-up streams will follow in the not too distant future. Is it likely that this will be a change get_iplayer can cope with?

I'm sure get_iplayer could be adapted. The big unknown is whether or not the BBC will use the switch to HDS for on-demand content to bring in DRM (a la C4). If they do that, it's game over for get_iplayer. It doesn't matter that you can download HDS streams if they're encrypted.

@ssme: To clarify, you would only need VLC if you were planning to re-mux or transcode the stream, or just to watch it live. You can dump it to file with only live streamer.

EDIT: remove reference to ffmpeg

Is there any suggestion that they are planning to move TV catch-up over to HDS or or is it just radio at the moment?

If the new HDS Live TV streams don't use DRM that may be a good sign?

I don't know about VOD, but I would assume it will go HDS at some point. Because it's such a different streaming architecture, I would assume the BBC will want to standardise. I don't know if the lack of live stream DRM augurs well or not for VOD. I could see live streams left open with VOD encrypted since that would remove the easy route to offline viewing. Some folks might go for downloading live in real time, but I'm not sure that would appeal to casual users. You might as well just get a PVR or USB tuner - a lot easier.