ABC’s iView technology is great. Being able to catch-up on shows you’ve missed or forgotten to set the recorder for is very handy. Unlike remembering to set the recorder iView is only available on a flash enabled, internet connected device – basically a laptop or desktop computer. This leaves the iPhone completely out in the cold or as the ABC’s iView web site puts it “! Warning… Sorry, iView is not currently available on iPhone”.
So if you want to watch iView shows on your iPhone, forget it! Right? Well not quite. There is a relatively simple way to get iView video from the ABC’s web site to an iPhone. But first, the journey…
I’ve spent a considerable number of hours Googleing this problem so maybe I can save someone a few hours of their own. There are a number of nerd-linger solutions to downloading content from the iView web site: There’s python-iview, which pretty much requires a computer science degree to install, and ABC iView Downloader for OSX, which is a command-line application which is not very intuitive and can be unreliable. There are a few other solutions out there and if you’re a Windows or Linux fan you will probably find many more but most of these require some level of rummaging around in the guts of your computer in the terminal which if you don’t know what your doing can be a bad idea.
The simplest solution I’ve found so far for the Mac is a combination of an experimental FireFox plug-in called iViewFox (sorry nothing for Safari or Chrome) and an oldie but a goody Handbreak. iViewFox can be installed much the same as any FireFox plug-in with one exception. After it is installed and FireFox restarts it will instruct you to complete the installation by entering some commands in the terminal – don’t panic, this is normal. Once its fully installed an ABC logo will appear in the FireFox status bar. To use the plug-in go to the ABC iView website navigate to a program you want to watch then when you click on the continue button instead of opening the video iViewFox will open a finder window and download the show for you as an MP4 file. To restore normal functionality to the iView website simply disable the plug-in.
The MP4 file that iViewFox downloads appears to be an oddly encoded FLV file in an MP4 wrapper. QuickTime 10 and 7.5 and iTunes did not want to have anything to do with this file (even with Flip4Mac and other codecs installed). The only app that would play these files was VLC but then it would not transcoded them so they could be put on an iPod. I tried every app I could think of on my system; commercial and open source (see a partial list below) but none of them would transcode the file. One possibility is that being on a 64bit Snow Leopard server and many of these apps being 32bit and relying on underlying OS command line apps is not a good combination. Not even my trusty old copy of VisualHub (RIP) would do it. Then my pilot light came on and I thought of Handbreak. I’m not a big fan of this app mostly because the UI is not the best for bulk conversions but I think it just one some big browny points. First there is now a 64bit version and second it had no trouble converting the strange FLV/MP4 files produced by iViewFox. Finally drag-and-drop the files produced by Handbreak into iTunes, sync and off you go.
5 Comments
“There’s python-iview, which pretty much requires a computer science degree to install”
Well, not really. Granted, there is no one click insaller wizard available. In windows you have to download and install a bunch of utilities sepeartely and set some environemnt variables. I’ve written about how to do this at http://brendangraetz.wordpress.com/2010/04/01/deploying-python-iview-on-windows/
On Ubuntu/Linux you can install the entire thing with a single shell script, which you can find at http://brendangraetz.wordpress.com/2010/05/21/python-iview-on-ubuntu/
Certainly no one-click installer or simple shell script for the Mac that I’ve found. I’m pretty savvy when it comes to the command line and shell scripts – for me python-iview was too much work to recomend for the average Mac user.
Hi Peter,
Your comments motivated me to create the Python-iView PPA. It should now be dead easy to install, on Ubuntu at least.
(If someone wants to see an RPM version…well, you are quite welcome to participate in making that happen.)
Cheers, Jeremy.
Oh, and in regards to what you wrote:
Actually, it’s the opposite. It’s an MP4 video (or FLV video in the case of the 7.30 Report) inside an FLV wrapper. Which is even worse.
To rewrap it inside a proper MP4 container (which makes certain videos play much smoother, or improves lip sync), you can run this:
$ ffmpeg -i the_video.flv -acodec copy -vcodec copy the_video.mp4Hi Pete, I wrote up a post on how I managed to get python-iview up and running on OSX. It’s a lot of command line work, but it is a step-by-step tutorial, so you should be able to just copy & paste all the terminal commands.
http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies.cfm?t=1381760&r=23805841#r23805841
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