I couldn't find a mention of this in these forums, so I thought I should let people know that you can now run get_iplayer natively on N900.

get_iplayer is a Perl script which allows you to download programs from the BBC iPlayer website (only in the UK). It has always been possible to run it in Easy Debian, but some of the required components were missing from the N900 side and therefore getting it to run natively used to be a bit fiddly. However, now these components are available in extras-devel, so get_iplayer can now be installed without any problems.

You need to install these packages from
extras-testing and extras-devel (at your own risk!):

• libwww-perl
• rtmpdump

To do that, open the terminal and run for each of these. It is possible that you need some more packages which I just happened to have installed already.

You are now ready to download and install get_iplayer itself. Download the latest tarball from ftp://ftp.infradead.org/pub/get_iplayer/ and save it to some convenient location. Then unpack it in the terminal window with the command
and make the script executable with
Now you can run get_iplayer with
For usage, look at the README.txt file or use get_iplayer --help.

The formats that seem to be working best are iphone and flashlow. By default, get_iplayer wants to convert the video to mp4, which takes time and needs ffmpeg, but that is not really necessary since the Media Player plays the original files just as well. Therefore, use the --raw option to leave the video in the original format. For example, to download The Importance of Being Earnest, go to your /home/user/MyDocs/.videos folder and run
When you open Media Player now, you should see the film in the Video category.