Flash iPlayer
From Beebhack
[edit] Flash / RTMP stream version
The web-based Adobe Flash version of the iPlayer was introduced on the 13th of December 2007, designed to bring the iPlayer to a larger audience than the Windows XP only iPlayer.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/12/13/flash_iplayer_launch/
The service streams the video over Adobe's proprietary RTMP, although the video itself is DRM-free.
[edit] Video URL resolving process
The flash client goes through the following process to resolve the location of each episode ID video:
- The media selector URL for the relevant episode is requested from http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediaselector/3/stream/check/iplayer?pid=[PID] this gives the script:
- token
- server
- identifier
- These make up an authentication string [auth] of the form auth=[token]&aifp=v001&slist=[identifier]
- The server string is used to fetch ident data from http://[server]/fcs/ident which contains the IP address of the media server
- The final stream URL is then resolved as rtmp://[ip_address]:1935/ondemand?_fcs_vhost=[server]&[auth]
An example of this algorithm can be found in this PHP script: http://www.strawp.net/files/iplayer_url.zip
[edit] Downloading
- Adobe products such as Flash support RTMP
- It is currently on the libcurl TODO list.
- rtmpdump and flvstreamer download RTMP iPlayer video streams (get_iplayer can use these tools to fetch live and archived programmes)
