BBC Radio iPlayer on N800
 

Hi,

I received my N800 today and immediately flashed it to OS2008.

I'm trying to listen to BBC radio listen again programs - the listen again player which launches isn't quite the same as it once was, having a different 'iPlayer appearance'.

Basically, nothing happens when I click on links to listen to a program again (although listening to programs live works fine). The play, volume and other transport buttons appear to have no effect.

On some radio stations, such as 5 live, a "listen using stand-alone player" option is present - and this works ok, launching the stream in the media player. On other stations such as radio 1, this link is not present and so I can't get the listen again programs to work. Anyone had any success?

As an aside - the iPlayer flash player appears to work fine for TV programmes, although video play back is a slideshow. I assume this is a limitation of the video hardware in the n800?

Many thanks for any help.
spann

Re: BBC Radio iPlayer on N800
 

For BBC Radio just goto www.bbc.co.uk/radio and play the required station. You can ten save in Media PLayer's Internet Radio

Re: BBC Radio iPlayer on N800
 

Right that does work for the live feeds, usually with a low bitrate stream. I think that spann might be referrignto individual shows which are much harder to get working. I had the same problem with some of the shows.

Re: BBC Radio iPlayer on N800
 

Hi Cashless and gerrymoth,

Thanks for the replies - absolutely right, the live feeds work fine from www.bbc.co.uk/radio. As Cashless says, I'm trying to get the listen again shows to work though, and unless the show I want to listen to has a "listen using stand-alone player" option, then I can't get it to happen unfortunately!

Spann

Re: BBC Radio iPlayer on N800
 

Yeah, I have a workaround that I used for a couple of the shows on 1Xtra. I'll go revisit it and give you the instructions.

Re: BBC Radio iPlayer on N800
 

Excellent, I'd appreciate that.

Cheers,
Spann

Re: BBC Radio iPlayer on N800
 

I use http://www.beebotron.timeforabrew.com for the national stations.
OJ

Re: BBC Radio iPlayer on N800
 

The problem that Spann is having isn't with the live shows. It's the archived individual shows.

RIF, people.

Re: BBC Radio iPlayer on N800
 

Yes. It's the Listen Again links that I use beebotron for.

As it says on the box:

"What is this?

This site provides rtsp RealAudio .ra and .rm streaming links for BBC Listen Again programs that the Beeb hides. It will let you listen to BBC broadcasts on smartphones, Pocket PCs, PDAs, and other mobile devices that the Beeb continue to refuse to support."

OJ

Re: BBC Radio iPlayer on N800
 

ahh... NICE!

Re: BBC Radio iPlayer on N800
 

Cheers OxfordJohn,

Exactly what I was looking for.

Spann

Re: BBC Radio iPlayer on N800
 

Glad you like the site!

Kronalias of the Beebotron

Re: BBC Radio iPlayer on N800
 

Lol, were you getting quite a few referrers from this site? :)

Re: BBC Radio iPlayer on N800
 

Lol yourself! Nope, but I can see where you're coming from!

I had an email from Google Alerts, which usually tells me that it's found something about the Beebotron after a few days. This time it was within a couple of hours of the post, so I thought I'd respond.

I didn't know about this site, but it seems pretty good and I think I'll lurk around it for a while!

Cheers, Kronalias

Re: BBC Radio iPlayer on N800
 

I mean no offence :D

Ahh, Google alerts seem quite useful, thanks for the pointer! :)

Re: BBC Radio iPlayer on N800
 

Whoa! No offence taken or meant, and if my post suggested that then I apologise humbly! (How do I put smilies in these posts...)

You got me thinking - I might just log referral sites just for interest - currently I keep a rolling log of the IPs of the last few hundred hits (which means the last week or so) and then run a script on the log occasionally just to see which countries my 'clients' are coming from. The Beebotron has been running for just over a year, and I expected most hits to come from the ex-pat areas. Not so! I get about half from the UK and the rest from pretty much all over the globe. As I don't really promote the site it would be interesting to me to know how people find out about it!

All the best, Kronalias

Re: BBC Radio iPlayer on N800
 

When I said lol, I meant as more of an surprise thing and I thought you took it the wrong way with "lol yourself" :).
Anyway you have nothing to be sorry about, it was my misinterpretation :)

Thanks again for the great site. I guess BBC Radio 1 is most popular in the UK but I guess with people hearing about world service, it gets more popular abroad.

I'd never heard about it before, but I am glad I did, it works nicely on my N800.

Regards,
qwerty

Re: BBC Radio iPlayer on N800
 

Hey Kronalias,

I do indeed like the website! Have it book-marked and use it regularly now, primarily to access listen again links to Radio One shows. The fact that the BBC iPlayer does not provide stand-alone links for these shows really scuppers play-back from the iPlayer on the N800.

Cheers,
Spann

Re: BBC Radio iPlayer on N800
 

I also use beebotron, practically every single day. Excellent stuff!!

Re: BBC Radio iPlayer on N800
 

OxfordJohn - thanks. Exactly what I was looking for since I had the same issue with iPlayer for R2. A great help.

Re: BBC Radio iPlayer on N800
 

it you could spoof iPhone user agent you can get at the DRM-free streams:
http://www.boingboing.net/2008/03/08...rm-from-i.html

Re: BBC Radio iPlayer on N800
 

Someone has worked out how to provide a direct mp4 for a given show on iplayer: http://www.dracos.co.uk/play/bbc-ipl...p4/?p=b009gf52
but I've been unable to play the stream with mplayer or media player so far.

(link originally from this post http://xbmc.org/forum/showpost.php?p...&postcount=120)

Re: BBC Radio iPlayer on N800
 

It'd be good to get to the bottom of this - I've got the firefox user agent hack working on my PC and have test downloaded a couple of mp4 files through Firefox. I can play them in VLC but nothing else, even Quicktime 7.2 doesn't work (suppose I'd better update Qt and iTunes). VLC reports the file as using avc1 (480x272, 25fps) video and mp4a audio codecs. I don't know enough abt the video side to work out the data rate but VLC stats report variable from 400kbs up to 700kbs.

Re: BBC Radio iPlayer on N800
 

unfortunately BBC are fighting back:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7293988.stm

Re: BBC Radio iPlayer on N800
 

I listen to the Danny Baker show on 94.9 (in local radio links). I also had the listen again problem that there was no link to open in an external player. One day I noticed if I reach the show by going through the "Select type of show" -> comedy and quizzes (rather than by selecting the 94.9 "select a radio station" link, the external player link was there.

Perhaps it will work for the Listen Again shows others are trying to reach...

Re: BBC Radio iPlayer on N800
 

this python script works for me, simply give it the URL of the iplayer web page or the program id.

Re: BBC Radio iPlayer on N800
 

There's a site that lists the "unobfuscated" links for all the BBC radio iPlayer/Listen Again catalogue: http://beebotron.timeforabrew.com

Just copy & paste into Media Player & ur good to go

Re: BBC Radio iPlayer on N800
 

BBC Radio 7 just switched over to the annoying iPlayer thing this week, having had simple working links before this. I hacked togeather a quick PHP script to rewrite the listen again page back into its old format. I have a copy online at http://www.quietplease.org/bbc7.php you can point your tablet browser to, and the source code is attached if you want it (rename .txt to .php, and consider it public domain). Apologies for the american-formated dates but I'm american.

Hadn't seen the beebotron before writing the script, but I think mine does a better job for BBC 7 by listing daily schedules and including subtitles, start and end times.

Revision Dec 19 2008: the BBC changed their format again to break things. Re-adjusted for that, and also fixed the subtitles positioning in the new attachment.