iplayer scraper
May 2, 2008
I’ve paid a bit of attention to the iPlayer development that has been occuring for linux over the last few months, with flash and mp4 versions. http://po-ru.com/ provides a ruby download script for the mp4 when passed the PID.
Now I’ve been thinking we can easily make this into a standalone player which users can browse on a desktop through the use of a GTK applications, or as a plugin for mythtv. To this end, I’ve hacked up a python scraper to generate the iPlayer listings and I’m publishing it here in the hope it’ll be of help to people.
It returns:
- URL with the PID
- URL for the thumbnail
- Title of show
- Date show was aired
- Duration of show
- Synopsis of show
I’ve create the core module and a small script to demonstrate how it can be called. What you choose to do with the data once it’s returned is left to yourselves.