Strawp.net

The beeb added a little update to the iPlayer again today, clearly as part of their (admirable) attempts at getting iPlayer working on exotic devices iPlayer is now Wii optimised! How cool! I’ve not tested it out, but this is the first “official” iPlayer version which is actually designed to display TV shows on a TV. We are living in the future!

I’ve written a few technical notes over on the Wiki, but basically they’re using the User-Agent string to serve a Flash 7 compatible stream.

Speaking of User-Agents, I’m hearing that the iPhone version of iPlayer has been tightening down on what User-Agent string you can get away with when you pretend to be an iPhone. No more “iPhone, LOL” strings I’m afraid

Thought I’d see if I could get a download script in just one line of console utilities. I could (although it’s actually 8 separate commands split over 12 lines, it’s still executed as one single bash statement). A pretty concise bit of code it is, too:

curl -b cookies.txt -A "Apple iPhone v1.1.3 CoreMedia v1.0.0.4A93" -H "Range: bytes=0-" -o iplayer_download.mov \
  $( \
    curl -i -c cookies.txt -A "Apple iPhone v1.1.3 CoreMedia v1.0.0.4A93" -H "Range: bytes=0-1" \
      $( \
        curl -i -A "iPhone, LOL" -c cookies.txt $1 \
        | grep "pid       :" \
        | cut -d\' -f2 \
        | sed "s/\([0-9a-z]\)/http:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/mediaselector\/3\/auth\/iplayer_streaming_http_mp4\/\1/" \
      ) \
    | grep Location \
    | cut -d: -f2,3 \
  )

I’ve created a new wiki all about using BBC content at beebhack.bluwiki.com

In the first 24 hrs it got 1500 page requests and it’s not looking to slow down just yet. I would have hosted it here at Strawp.net but I wanted this to be more community owned than something I would run.

The downside of course is that I really don’t have any detailed information on where any of those hits are coming from…

The old Strawp.net blogging engine was one of the first pieces of web software I wrote in PHP and its graceless translation into PHP5 was one of the reasons I almost entirely stopped writing entries. The last two items on there I had to write SQL INSERT statements for just to get them online. It was definitely time to give it both barrels!

RIP Strawp.net News, long live Strawp.net blog!

Edit: I know how lazy it is using the default Wordpress theme but I like it!

I’ve been doing two fun things this week. The first was playing around with the iPlayer again. Last Friday (7th March) the Beeb made the rather confusing move of releasing an iPhone-optimised version of the iPlayer. Now, the iPhone doesn’t support Flash, so it was all H264 over HTTP. You could get to this resource on a predictable URL just by changing your user agent to that of an iPhone. No DRM, no proprietary streaming format, and for a platform which is minority in the extreme, making a mockery of the “big platforms first” defence that the BBC used for rolling out Windows-only versions of iPlayer.

Anyway, a few days after this was all revealed, they “patched” the service, which actually meant they just checked on the “Range” HTTP header as well as the “User-Agent” one. Pretty weak. By the end of that same day, I’d updated my download script, and so had Paul Battley, followed by johnsto who has written an XBMC version of the exploit.

What will Auntie do next? Let the games commence…

I’ve also put a PC into my car this week, written up on the project page.

Over a year since the last update, yeah I know. I’ve been busy with other stuff

I thought I’d better link this up though. At the end of December 2007 the BBC launched the web-based Flash version of it’s iPlayer server (which allows you to watch TV from within the last week). This was prompted somewhat by the backlash against the Windows XP only version of their iPlayer software which pissed off a lot of Mac, Linux (and even Vista) users. The new service works on any browser with a recent version of the Flash player installed, thus requiring no other specialist software.

This is great because it also means that the shows (that I’ve already paid for with my license fee) are no longer restricted to Windows DRM and it’ll work on my Ubuntu laptop.

Predictably, a thread had already started on the XBox Media Center forums prior to this requesting a script to make iPlayer content play on XBMC although with DRM and closed source software this was unlikely to happen.

After the web player was launched, the thread exploded into activity and it was clear that a few people in the community (notably Phil Wilson) and myself were trying to work out a way of side-stepping the iPlayer flash client to get to the juicy video goodness behind it.

Skip forward a week or so and after I’d trawled through a decompiled version of the flash player, I’ve come up with a script which does just that:

iplayer_url.

Give this CLI script a programme ID (PID) or the URL of a BBC programmes page or iPlayer page and it will output the media stream. The community is now waiting for some enterprising chap to get RTMP support into mPlayer or curl.

The discussion is currently continuing with lots of frightfully intelligent people on the BBC Backstage mailing list.

Regular visitors may have noticed I’m a bit of a del.icio.us nut. I use it for everything. The problem I’m getting now, after about 18 months of use is that I’ve got so many tags in my tag cloud that it actually takes quite a bit of CPU and RAM to render one of my pages.

Step up delite.strawp.net - a quick one-pager that I just threw together. Basically, stick the path you’d want from del.icio.us on the end of that address and get a stripped-down “lite” version of that page that isn’t going to crash your PDA, phone or Wii, e.g. delite.strawp.net/strawp/videos.

It’s not going to be lightening quick because it still has to request the original page from del.icio.us but it should make accessing your bookmarks on a small device less of a headache.

Apologies for the hopeless uptime of this site - my host appears to have fired everyone that knew what they were doing and replaced them with a pack of drooling gibbons.

A few weeks ago I got a bluetooth GPS module for my iPaq, just to play around with. Since Wififofum collects GPS data if it’s available, I’ve been recording wireless access point data as I’ve been walking about the town, commuting to work or driving.

The data I’ve gotten so far (about 600 access points) isn’t that useful on its own, but what’s really interesting is slicing the data in various ways and seeing what you come up with. To do this I built a new site: wifi.strawp.net into which I can upload the log files from wififofum. For a day or so I had the front page of the site plot location data of access points into Google Maps, searchable by SSID, manufacturer, channel etc, however I was advised by friends that doing so was probably a really bad idea, so this information is now on a login-only basis.

The fun part, which is still publicly available is the stats page. If you’ve got a friend that you’re trying to convince they need to secure their wireless network, link them to that page. You can currently see the most popular manufacturers, the most commonly used SSID and - my favourite - the number of access points that have their default SSID and appear to have no encryption set. This is currently at just over one in six (16.9%), which is quite frankly frightening. You probably won’t be surprised to learn that the best place to look if you want to stumble across one of these access points is a suburban area where if Coventry is anything to go by, you’re likely to find an insecure access point on any street you care to walk down.

If you’re still wondering what the issue is, the BBC’s The Real Hustle did a very neat little feature on why you should use WPA encryption on your network.

I have a lot of devices that I’d like to keep the same calendar in sync on: Two phones, an iPaq, my work PC, my home PC and Google Calendar. The smartphone and iPaq played nicely with outlook but there was some “glue” needed to get my Sony Ericsson phone and Google Calendar in on it.

The “glue” is a few pieces of software I found recently. First of all, to sync my Sony Ericsson with GCal I use GCalSync over GPRS, then to sync GCal with Outlook I can use either Companionlink for Google Calendar (a little buggy, doesn’t auto-update, not free) or RemoteCalendars which is Open Source and very flexible. A no brainer which one I picked, really.

More info on using RemoteCalendars with Google Calendars on jakeludington.com

If there’s anything good about Summer ending and Autumn and Winter rolling in it’s a new season of TV the world over. In the UK some shows have already had an entire new series and in the US they’re just warming up.

Here’s what I’ve been watching:

- Dexter. A forensics expert who is also a serial killer. Sounds naff, actually really good.
- Everybody Hates Chris season 2. Same as the last season, hasn’t lost its charm yet
- Family Guy season 6. Unlike the Simpsons, this just gets better and better. Currently on episode 3
- Heroes. A new favourite of mine. This series follows the lives of ordinary people as they discover they have super powers. Brilliant characters, compelling plot.
- My Name Is Earl series 2. Proper feel-good, laugh-out-loud stuff
- Robot Chicken series 2. Pop culture gags animated with action figures with plenty of ultraviolence.
- Freak Show A new surrealist cartoon from David Cross about the most ineffective superhero team in the world
- The Mitchell and Webb Look Sighs all round as Mitchell and Webb transition their show seamlessly from Radio 4 to TV. Not a bad miss at all.
- Extras series 2. Trailed off and got a bit formulaic and then pulled it all back for a brilliant last episode
- Lead Balloon. New comedy from Jack Dee who is basically playing himself. Same sort of uncomfortable deadpan humour as Curb Your Enthusiasm and Extras. Great stuff.