“tw h” for help text.

The source isn’t published at the moment, but if you want it I’ll clean it up (take out my hard-coded username and password) and upload it - just leave a comment.

The whale is based on this one which I turned into my own version reversed with added twitter birdies.

P Lewis has since incorporated this update into a really nice full featured script for browsing and downloading video from iPlayer.

I really hope this update wasn’t what the iPlayer team were doing for the last couple of months. Bloody waste of license payer’s cash if it was.

More technical details on the Wiki as they come in.

(See also Paul Battley’s blog)

#!/bin/bash

# Converts all AAC (m4a) files in a folder into mp3s, plus the id3 tag
# Requires faad, lame, id3v2

for a in *
do
  # Check the file is a flac file
  if [[ "$a" =~ (m4a)$ ]]
  then
    # Name of outfile
    OUTF=`echo “$a” | sed s/\.m4a/.mp3/g`
    echo “$a => $OUTF”

    # Capture all the FLAC metadata
    ARTIST=`faad -i “$a” 2>&1 | grep “^artist” | sed “s/.*: //g”`
    TITLE=`faad -i “$a” 2>&1 | grep “^title” | sed “s/.*: //g”`
    ALBUM=`faad -i “$a” 2>&1 | grep “^album” | sed “s/.*: //g”`
    GENRE=`faad -i “$a” 2>&1 | grep “^genre” | sed “s/.*: //g”`
    TRACKNUMBER=`faad -i “$a” 2>&1 | grep “^track” | sed “s/.*: //g”`
    YEAR=`faad -i “$a” 2>&1 | grep “^date” | sed “s/.*: //g”`

    # echo “$ARTIST - $TITLE - $GENRE - $TRACKNUMBER”

    # Convert the audio data from AAC to MP3
    faad -w “$a” | lame -V 2 -m j -b 192 -B 224 -s 44.1 - “$OUTF”

    # Tag the resulting MP3 with the captured metadata
    id3v2 -t “$TITLE” -T “$TRACKNUMBER” -a “$ARTIST” -A “$ALBUM” -g “$GENRE” -y “$YEAR” “$OUTF”
  fi
done

If you’re using a desktop debian distro, just use SoundConverter:

sudo apt-get install soundconverter

If you’re shelling into a server (or you just prefer CLI), you’ll need a script and a few audio tools. Here’s the bash script (based on this one):

#!/bin/bash

# Converts all flac files in a folder into mp3s, plus the id3 tag
# Requires flac, metaflac, lame, id3v2

for a in *
do
  # Check the file is a flac file
  if [[ "$a" =~ flac$ ]]
  then
    # Name of outfile
    OUTF=`echo “$a” | sed s/\.flac/.mp3/g`
    echo “$a => $OUTF”

    # Capture all the FLAC metadata
    ARTIST=`metaflac “$a” –show-tag=ARTIST | sed s/.*=//g`
    TITLE=`metaflac “$a” –show-tag=TITLE | sed s/.*=//g`
    ALBUM=`metaflac “$a” –show-tag=ALBUM | sed s/.*=//g`
    GENRE=`metaflac “$a” –show-tag=GENRE | sed s/.*=//g`
    TRACKNUMBER=`metaflac “$a” –show-tag=TRACKNUMBER | sed s/.*=//g`

    # Convert the audio data from FLAC to MP3
    flac -c -d “$a” | lame -m j -b 256 -s 44.1 - “$OUTF”

    # Tag the resulting MP3 with the captured metadata
    id3v2 -t “$TITLE” -T “$TRACKNUMBER” -a “$ARTIST” -A “$ALBUM” -g “$GENRE” “$OUTF”
  fi
done

Save that off in your path, make it executable:

chmod u+wrx flac2mp3

and run it from an location with mp3s in. It’ll convert all FLAC files to identically named MP3 files with the id3v2 information based on the FLAC metadata.

You’ll need flac, metaflac, id3v2 and lame:

sudo apt-get install flac id3v2 lame

Happy converting

So, a good time to take advantage of a better implementation of MediaWiki than we had at BluWiki and hopefully some better uptime. Angela even imported all our existing wiki data for us.

Beebhack.wikia.com

I’ve written a few technical notes over on the Wiki, but basically they’re using the User-Agent string to serve a Flash 7 compatible stream.

Speaking of User-Agents, I’m hearing that the iPhone version of iPlayer has been tightening down on what User-Agent string you can get away with when you pretend to be an iPhone. No more “iPhone, LOL” strings I’m afraid

curl -b cookies.txt -A "Apple iPhone v1.1.3 CoreMedia v1.0.0.4A93" -H "Range: bytes=0-" -o iplayer_download.mov \
  $( \
    curl -i -c cookies.txt -A "Apple iPhone v1.1.3 CoreMedia v1.0.0.4A93" -H "Range: bytes=0-1" \
      $( \
        curl -i -A "iPhone, LOL" -c cookies.txt $1 \
        | grep "pid       :" \
        | cut -d\' -f2 \
        | sed "s/\([0-9a-z]\)/http:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/mediaselector\/3\/auth\/iplayer_streaming_http_mp4\/\1/” \
      ) \
    | grep Location \
    | cut -d: -f2,3 \
  )

In the first 24 hrs it got 1500 page requests and it’s not looking to slow down just yet. I would have hosted it here at Strawp.net but I wanted this to be more community owned than something I would run.

The downside of course is that I really don’t have any detailed information on where any of those hits are coming from…