a, er, friend has reverse engineered the API calls made to the BBC servers by Android devices and written a web interface to get_iplayer which uses them*

The problem is that there's a key API call which hasn't been discovered by packet sniffing, and/or proxy logging:
When searching, the text search API call returns a mixture of brands, series and episode pids. It's possible to also search by the pid of a brand or series, but the results don't include every episode available. What's needed is to know the API call which lists all the episodes for a specific brand or series without getting other random entries.
These calls are made to http://ibl.api.bbci.co.uk or http://data.bbc.co.uk

Can anyone help with the API calls? Or say where it's possible to get a copy of the API documentation?

* the web interface has various features... as well as searching for programs, it lists highlights and popular items. It allows items to be queued for download with a back-end job that drives get_iplayer. It also has a page showing downloaded items, allowing items to be played (jw longtail player), downloaded or deleted. Quite a useful tool. I'm sure it could be made available to beta testers once it's been improved.

If this is the iBL (iPlayer Business Layer) API, the call would be something like:

http://ibl.api.bbci.co.uk/ibl/v1/program...ld_count=4

Where %p is the PID, %r is web, tv or online.

The api_key parameter seems to be optional.

If this is Nitro then the request would be something like:

http://programmes.api.bbc.com/nitro/api/...ia_type=%m

Where %p is the PID and %k is the api_key and %m is audio_video or audio.

Nitro API documentation is available at
https://developer.bbc.co.uk/sites/defaul...lients.pdf
https://developer.bbc.co.uk/content/programmes-api
and unofficially at http://mermade.github.io/swagger/index.html#/feeds

Actually on further investigation, what you probably want is something like:

http://ibl.api.bbci.co.uk/ibl/v1/groups/...=available

Where %p is the group (for curated collections), brand or series PID.

Unofficial iBL API documentation now up at http://mermade.github.io/swagger/index.h...agger.json