Python command-line and GTK+ interface to ABC iView

Copyright © 2009–2010 by Jeremy Visser <jeremy@visser.name>

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.

Requirements

• Python 3.2+, <http://www.python.org/>

For the GUI:

• Py G Object, <https://live.gnome.org/PyGObject>. Debian and Ubuntu package: python3-gi.
• GTK 3, <http://www.gtk.org/>, including the G Object introspection bindings

Optional dependencies:

• For the live News 24 stream, or to use the RTMP streaming host: rtmpdump, <https://rtmpdump.mplayerhq.hu/>
• To use a SOCKS proxy: Py Socks, <https://github.com/Anorov/PySocks>, or socksipy, <https://code.google.com/p/socksipy-branch/>

Installation

1. Make sure Python is installed and working.
2. Either run ./iview-cli or ./iview-gtk.

Usage

Some usage examples are provided for your perusal.

This is a purely informational command. It verifies that handshaking is working correctly, and shows which streaming host is used.

$ ./iview-cli --print-auth
iView auth data:
    Streaming Host: Akamai
    RTMP Token: [...]
    HDS Token: [...]
    Server URL: http://iviewmetered-vh.akamaihd.net/z/
    Playpath Prefix: playback/_definst_/
    Unmetered: False

This can be used to list the iView programmes and find a programme’s file name:

$ ./iview-cli --programme
7.30:
    7.30 Episode 193 26/11/2013     (news/730s_Tx_2611.mp4)
    7.30 25/11/2013 (news/730s_Tx_2511.mp4)
    7.30 20/11/2013 (news/730s_Tx_2011.mp4)
[...]

To actually download the programme, use something like the following:

$ ./iview-cli --download news/730s_Tx_2611.mp4

Hopefully that will download an .flv file into your current directory, appropriately named. Downloaded files always use the FLV container format, despite any “.mp4” suffix in the original name.

RTMP

Iview now seems to use the HDS protocol for most programmes, although it used to use the RTMP protocol. However, RTMP still seems to be used for the News 24 live stream, and the on-demand programmes still seem to be available from the old RTMP host.

To use RTMP, install rtmpdump. If building from source, copy rtmpdump to somewhere within your $PATH (e.g. /usr/local/bin). The RTMP host may be forced with the “iview-cli --host AkamaiRTMP” option.

Hacking

Uh...good luck.

There are a few variables that can be edited in the “config.py” file.

Changes

• 4 Jul 2015: Switch to Panasonic API after Humax was retired
• 28 Jun 2015: Fix subtitles with new video URLs
• 17 Apr 2015: Switch to a different web API to get new video URLs working
• 30 Mar 2015: Avoid text encoding crash in programme list
• 13 Dec 2014: Sensible handling of odd programme titles
• 7 Dec 2014: Sickbeard-compatible episode number in filenames; improve HTTP connection handling; ability to resume HDS downloads; code and indentation cleanups
• 24 Mar 2014: Work around incomplete HTTP read, triggered by existing gzip encoding workaround
• 18 Jan 2014: Work around too many values being returned by series API
• 2 Jan 2014: Fix downloading subtitles to stdout; add test suite
• 31 Oct 2013: Fix date parsing error
• 9 Oct 2013: Fix piping HDS to stdout; lots of code cleanup
• 23 Aug 2013: Fix FLV file structure; basic support for categories
• 18 Aug 2013: Fix for ampersand in subtitles; HDS improvements; future-proof in case there is no player verification
• 14 Jul 2013: Port to GTK 3; support unmetered Akamai HD streaming; drop Python 2 support
• 15 Jun 2013: Workaround for resuming zero-length files; workaround to avoid Akamai HD streaming unmetered host
• 3 Feb 2013: Batch download facility; port to Python 3 (still supporting Python 2.6); drop Beautiful Soup dependency

:wq