iPlayer Downloader – a work of Genius
If you live in the UK, then you will know how iPlayer is rapidly becomming the only way to access TV: on demand, when you need it and without advertisments: I’m not being elitist, but very little on ITV actually interests me, whereas the BBC is the most important UK institution after the Church of England: from radio to rubbish experimental comedy on BBC3, it’s all we need.
Downloading a video from iPlayer is tricky, and comes bundled with some very limiting digital rights management which makes me unhappy, and you can’t simply grab a few frames to illustrate an assembly, youth talk or sermon, let alone use footage of current news events to help focus the prayer of the community that easily.
Well, for a time now I have been using iPlayer Downloader which gets around the DRM restrictions by the simple expediency of pretending to be an iPhone, so the BBC sends the data down the wire in an unencrypted format (H.264 if you are really interested) and you save it.
It is simple to use and effective.
It is a multi-platform tool and is available with a GUI for Windows and Mac; and all kinds of Linux as a command-line program
I highly recommend this utility: five stars
