Because it’s there—attributed to George Mallory, on being asked, Why do you want to climb Mt. Everest?

I had great fun working out how to download programmes from the iPlayer, fighting against the BBC’s cat and mouse games. I loved the controversy and notoriety. But I’m thinking about abandoning the iPlayer Downloader project for a number of reasons.

  • I feel that I succeeded in what I set out to achieve. I wanted to make it possible to download programmes, but I don’t really need to. Building the downloader was an enjoyable exercise, but it’s not scratching my itch.
  • The GUI is very limited, and I’m not really motivated to address that, or to give users the features they’re asking for. Similarly, I don’t take bug reports very seriously.
  • I’ve got other new projects to work on that are better ways to spend my free time.
  • There are other programmes that will do the same and more.

The code will still be there. I recently moved it to Github, so it’s easier than ever to fork it, and I might even pull the changes. What I’m proposing to do is to abandon responsibility for keeping it up to date or adding new features.

A lot of people keep asking if my program can download HD content. It can’t. But I know a program that can: get_iplayer. It doesn’t make sense to me to duplicate that work.

Anyway, at the moment, it’s just something I’m thinking about. I’d welcome your feedback.