Although my downloader and various other people’s efforts are still working to download programmes from the iPlayer, the files we now get back won’t actually play on anything.

At first, I thought that it might be an encoding error at the BBC, but no: the programmes can be watched on an iPhone.

file says that it’s an ‘Apple QuickTime movie file’. The headers state that it has been encoded by libfaac. This suggests that it’s a genuine movie.

It appears that the BBC have found a way to produce a QuickTime movie that’s playable only on iPhones. Whether that’s DRM or just taking advantage of some kind of out-of-spec stream handling on the iPhone is yet to be seen.

Keep an eye on the Beebhack Wiki at its new location. We’ll get to the bottom of what’s happening.