The BBC believes that you should only use its online services through the proprietary software of one of its preferred technology companies. As a result of this, you can no longer use iplayer-dl/iPlayer Downloader.

The BBC has recently changed the iPhone iPlayer to use an HTTPS connection for part of the process. This requires the client to offer an Apple-signed client certificate as part of the connection. This has always been the case for the iPad version, but the iPhone change is new.

This means that a client device that does not have an Apple certificate can no longer connect to the BBC servers. This includes my downloader.

I have a few options:

  1. Extract the client key from an iPhone or iPod Touch.
  2. Rewrite the downloader to use RTMPE instead of HTTP.
  3. Give up.

If anyone can explain how to extract the client certificate from an iOS device, I’ll be very grateful.

I shan’t be making any upgrades in the immediate future. In the meantime, however, if you’re looking for an alternative, you could look at get_iplayer.

The reason the BBC gives for restricting access to non-blessed clients is piracy concerns. I would therefore like to appeal to irony by suggesting that both BitTorrent and Usenet are excellent ways to get hold of BBC TV programmes. I encourage you to check them out.

Please don’t use the comments as a support forum for get_iplayer! There’s a mailing list for that.