Get Iplayer for Windows

[dinkypumpkin]

On 25/09/2011 12:49, James Cook wrote:
> I suppose where I'm going with this is a VirtualBox holding only a CLI
> (command line - shell) Ubuntu/*nix being accessed on the command line
> from the host system where you do something like
> ">virtbox client shell get_iplayer --pid=w343rft"
> and it writes mp4s to the host file system
> So in effect no new OS for the user.

I get it now.  I was thinking of "vmplayer" a bit too literally.  Your 
method works OK here for downloads, but I couldn't find a working 
incantation for live streaming (no loss in my book, and maybe not 
possible).  But, in a lovely bit of synchronicity, guest execution has 
recently been broken by VirtualBox 4.1.2 guest additions.

On question springs to mind: how much can an Ubuntu installation be 
stripped down?  VirtualBox + VM w/ default Ubuntu command-line install + 
all get_iplayer dependencies could take up 1GB on the host system disk. 
  The current Windows install is ~200MB, but that could be cut by a 
third if VLC were dropped.  I'd guess Linux disk overhead would be 
somewhat less since perl is already installed.  I suppose most people 
wouldn't be bothered, but 1GB seems hefty just for get_iplayer.

Another, minor consideration: the web pvr manager.  I don't think it is 
currently packaged for Ubuntu, but if your concept were to become 
reality it would be a shame to lose it, particularly for Windows users. 
  It works OK via VirtualBox as well, but I'm not sure what would the 
best way to configure it: start/stop scripts on host, boot-time startup 
on guest, or something else.  That decision would feed into the 
packaging and/or host system setup scripts.