I’ve had a productive evening hacking iplayer-dl. Here’s a short list of improvements:

  • Checks the availability of different versions of the video based on type and date.
  • Fetches the ‘Original’ version by preference. (Previously, it would tend to fetch the sign language version. This can be modified in the code if you do want signed videos.)
  • Resumes downloading if interrupted and restarted.
  • You can now specify just a PID (the eight letter/number code) on the command line instead of the URL, if you prefer.
  • Uses the XML metadata service to determine the title and subtitle with greater accuracy.

And, as I promised, here’s a Subversion repository for those of you who want to keep up to date with changes:

svn co http://paulbattley.googlecode.com/svn/iplayer-dl

The latest version will continue to be available via the download link.

There’s an update here.