For those that don’t read my Twitter/Identi.ca stream, I’ve been writing an application, which I have neglected to name anything, so let’s call it Python-iView.
It’s a Python-based frontend to ABC iView, which if you’ve been living under a rock, is an awesome ABC TV programme catchup service that lets you watch most ABC programs from the last month in your browser. Not only that, but our ISP, Internode, has unmetered the service so it doesn’t use up our download quota.
However, it has some major problems:
- It depends on the use of the Adobe Flash plugin, which is proprietary software, which means that only changes or fixes for bugs in the plugin that Adobe approve of can be applied.
- Flash only runs on Windows, Mac OS X, and x86 (32-bit or 64-bit) Linux. (e.g. our 1GHz Apple eMac running Linux has a PowerPC processor, which Adobe have chosen not to support, and thus cannot access iView, but would otherwise be powerful enough to play the videos.)
- The videos must be watched in the browser inside Flash, which is a lot of overhead compared to a simple media player like VLC. iView is too slow on older or less powerful computers. (e.g. iView is so slow it is unusable on my ASUS Eee PC 901, even though it internally only uses 640×480 FLV video which should in theory be playable by any computer made in the last 10 years.)
- Videos must be launched from within the web browser, and cannot be watched offline (e.g. downloading in advance for a long car trip). Though the ABC offers a download service for some of its programmes, it is not as comprehensive as the iView programme. Nor can videos be downloaded for the purposes of fair dealing (e.g. interoperability — see points about Flash being proprietary above).
- Not everyone has a fast Internet connection, and cannot watch the videos in real-time. You can get much smoother playback by downloading a video in advance and watching it once it is finished.
To address this, I wrote the open source (GPLv3) application Python-iView, which does two main things:
- Allows you to browse the iView programme outside of the browser (from a GTK+ interface).
- Allows you to download episodes to your hard drive in their original FLV format.
You can then play the resulting FLV files in a media player such as VLC or Totem. The ABC formats their video into a 16:9 ratio in a 640×480 resolution. Because of that, the video may appear squashed — make sure to select the 16:9 aspect ratio in your movie player to compensate.
To get this magic application for yourself, install the following:
- Bazaar (package bzr in Debian and Ubuntu)
- Python 2.6 (preinstalled on most Linux distributions)
- BeautifulSoup (package python-beautifulsoup in Debian and Ubuntu)
- rtmpdump (download the source, and copy the
rtmpdumpexecutable to/usr/local/bin, or somewhere in your$PATH)
Then, run the following to download python-iview:
$ bzr branch http://jeremy.visser.name/bzr/python-iview/ python-iview
You can then launch either iview-cli for a command-line interface, or iview-gtk for a graphical interface. See the included README file for further instructions and usage examples.
Because of this application, I am now able to browse and view iView programmes on my Eee PC, Apple eMac (PowerPC), play programmes on our TV (through our Xbox) instead of having to watch them on a computer screen, or watch programmes during car trips.
