BBC News/Sports Clips

[Vangelis forthnet]

This e-mail pertains to the following Support Forum thread:

https://squarepenguin.co.uk/forums/thread-869-post-4062.html

started by forum member "Barnacles"

In his attempt to aid Barnacles, SquarePenguin
pointed him eventually to my Oct 2015 list post/guide:

http://lists.infradead.org/pipermail/get_iplayer/2015-October/008346.html

While this guide remains valid for older BBC News Clips like the
one it features, http://www.bbc.com/news/health-34665151,
the beeb recently have again changed things with regards to News Clips,
so inevitably my Oct '15 guide applies only partly :-(

In his follow-up reply, Barnacles is trying to fetch:

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-36339296

(though he's not stating it plainly, I had to hunt it down
in the BBC News site...).
 To begin with, despite being about UK politics,
this specific clip is available globally, so I am not
circumventing any BBC geo-block measures.
(I have witnessed people having their threads prematurely
locked in the forum, simply by the fact they have a non-UK
IP - something the forum admins can easily check...)

First change is the clip is being streamed in a desktop browser
with Flash via AdobeHDS method by default (used to be
RTMP), that GiP does not support (right-click on player):

1700kbps | HDS (mf_limelight_world_hds) | p03vnkdz | 960x540

=> vpid=p03vnkdz

This is OT to this list, but should you have PHP installed,
AdobeHDS.php script installed, Mozilla Firefox installed
together with HDS Link Detector addon, you can easily
fetch that clip as an .FLV file (your favourite search engine
is your friend).

With vpid at hand, you can continue to apply the"manual"
approach described in my guide via mediaselector URLs
which can lead to a Direct Download HTTP URL or
an rtmpdump command...

Should you opt to use GiP 2.94, as per my guide start
playback in Firefox and via its WebConsole perform
URL sniffing with 36339296 as a search filter; among
other matches, you'll get:

http://www.bbc.com/news/video_and_audio/api/meta/uk-politics-36339296/group/see-alsos?callback=cpItems

which is a JSON file with all the info you'll need
(if on Firefox, install the following addon,
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/jsonview/
which will make reading easier...)
In the very first block you'll get

parentPid": "p03vnkdv"

and that string is the PID to be used in Gip 2.94:

get_iplayer --type=tv --pid=p03vnkdv

(downloads flashvhigh tvmode).

FWIW, GiP 2.95dev has been patched
FOR THE VERY LAST TIME to cope
with recent News Clips in commit:

https://github.com/get-iplayer/get_iplayer/commit/a32eac3

Any 2.95dev snapshot after git-a32eac3 is able
(until broken by the BBC) to fetch News Clips
simply by URL:

(In  the CLI:)
perl 
get_iplayer-295dev-gcd023e0.pl --url="http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-36339296" 
 -i | FindStr modes

=> modes:          default: 
flashvhigh1,hlsvhigh1,hvfvhigh1,hvfvhigh2,hvfhigh1,hvfh
igh2,hvfstd1,hvfstd2,hvflow1,hvflow2

295dev is of course unsupported, but I am
confident Barnacles can get further support
in the forum, should he wish to try it to
satisfy his News Clips downloadling needs...

Kind regards,
Vangelis.