In what seems to be a burst of the kind over-enthusiasm that the iPhone inspires, someone at the BBC has set up a special version of the iPlayer for that shiny toy. It recognises the iPhone’s user agent and serves up standard MP4 files.

No Flash. No streaming. No DRM. Excellent.

Here’s a little tool that uses cURL and a little Ruby glue to pretend to be an iPhone and download those MP4 files for offline viewing at your leisure. Just give it the URL of an iPlayer viewing page and it will do the rest.

iplayer-dl