Handy update from Alex Eames over at RasPi.TV.

I’ve posted several times in the past about get_iplayer – a very useful set of scripts that allow you to download BBC iPlayer content for offline viewing. I’ve even written a MagPi article about it, which also appears in the Official Raspberry Pi Projects Book

There have been several software updates since then, but something broke some time over the last few months (I wasn’t watching closely) and get_iplayer now requires a manual install of FFMPEG or it won’t convert the downloaded .ts files to .MP4

I think what broke was that the file format changed to allow higher quality streams (or something like that) and the default avconv can’t handle the new format. So FFMPEG, which is no longer part of Debian (and hence Raspbian) needs to be installed manually to overcome this.

When I found that out I went “EEEEEEEEEEK” because I can remember, in the first weeks of Pi, having to compile FFMPEG, which took 10 hours on a Pi 1. I’m sure it would be a LOT faster on a Pi3. But, happily, we don’t have to do it because ccrisan has shared a pre-compiled .deb file on github

So I’m going to give a complete rundown of the get_iplayer installation with the new part at the end…

Read more.