We decided to have a bit of fun and provide a web interface to the open source get_iplayer command line utility.
This is a personal project that was not commissioned by the BBC. We decided to explore some ideas to free ourselves from the Beeb’s own iplayer site.
Search and you’ll find what you’re looking for
The interface is centered around a unified search box. It allows you to look up a show’s title, as you’d expect. But you can also find shows by looking for the names of actors and directors, genres and other kinds of metadata that we’ve gathered from the BBC’s feeds into our continously updated database. You may also want to know what’s been added today, yesterday or this week, so you can search exactly that.
Upon finding a show you’d like to download, you can add it to a queue that can be rearranged via drag-and-drop.
All things must come to and end
We halted our work after development on get_iplayer was stopped. In the meanwhile other developers have taken on the getiplayer project, so we might resume our work in the future.