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.