The BBC website only makes a podcast available for seven days. After that, you may be able to listen to the program using their iPlayer. I had missed the first podcast of the 2009 Reith Lectures and wanted to have it in my iPod alongside the second lecture that I had downloaded. And so began the search for the solution. The steps that I had to perform in order to accomplish this task were:
Download the BBC real audio stream
I found the iPlayer Converter web site, which provided me the RealAudio stream for the BBC iPlayer stream. If you read the web site, it explains that the BBC changed from distributing Real Player audio streams to distributing encrypted MP3 via its own iPlayer streaming audio application. The BBC still has working links to the RealAudio stream, and the web site provides these links.
I had to determine the URL to the BBC RealAudio stream. The iPlayer Converter website can generate it from the BBC iPlayer Program ID, but I didn’t know what that was. So I worked out the URL by looking at existing URLs on the iPlayer Converter web site and noticing that it used the same pattern as the URL of the iPlayer link. So that was easy enough.
So now I have the RealAudio URL. Now I need to download the audiostream. To do this I used the evaluation version of HiDownload from StreamingStar. I would have preferred to use a free version, and downloaded SMPlayer. However, I couldn’t figure out how to do it. As it’s a GUI over the mplayer command-line program, I think that I had to use the mplayer program on the command-line. But that seemed like too much work.
Convert the RealAudio file to MP4
I downloaded SUPER, another GUI to the mplayer command-line program, and converted the file to MP4.
Note: I first converted it to MP3, which is the format of the podcasts that the BBC publishes. However, when trying to do the next step (making it appear as a podcast in iTunes), the program I used couldn’t work with MP3 files.
Import into iTunes as a Podcast
I could simply add the MP4 file to iTunes, and it would appear as a music file. However, I wanted it to appear as a podcast, and if possible, to appear next to the other 2009 Reith Lecture podcasts.
To do this, I downloaded AtomicParsley, which is a command-line program that modifies the iTunes meta data in MP4 files. I executed the following command:
<pathToAtomicParsley>\AtomicParsley.exe “Reith_Markets and Morals 09 Jun 09.MP4″ –podcastFlag=true –podcastURL “http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/radio4/reith/rss.xml”
I then added the file to iTunes and it appeared where it should. (Well, I actually added it before re-running the programt with the podcastURL flag, then deleted it, then added it afterwards with the podcastURL setting. So I’m presuming that it would have worked first time had I modified the podcastURL flag first.)
QED
So that was it! It seems simple enough, but it took a long time to wade through forums, trying out programs and settling on this method. Now I have to uninstall the stuff that I didn’t end up using…
Tags: HowTo, Multimedia
