NEWS
Just hours after the BBC said it had fixed the iPlayer streamed TV service to prevent DRM-free file downloads, a London-based programmer has bypassed the new protection.
Paul Battley, a developer for crowd-sourced reviews site Reevoo, wrote on his blog that he had "defeated" the fixed iPlayer code.
Battley wrote: "BBC News proudly announced the BBC's victory over those of us who had figured out how to download their iPhone iPlayer streams. I am happy to announce that I've defeated them once again!"
Speaking to silicon.com sister site ZDNet.co.uk, Battley said he had asked a colleague to use an iPod Touch, combined with a debugging proxy, to watch communications made by a legitimate iPlayer access. Battley then used plug-in requests to look through the Javascript to work out the changes that had been made to the iPlayer code. He then rewrote his own original Ruby iPlayer interface "hack" code.
Battley said: "I'm a Linux user, and the BBC iPlayer originally was only for Windows - I felt a bit alienated. The BBC released the iPhone version of iPlayer, and there's no Linux support."
Battley added that one version of iPlayer does stream to devices that can use Flash Player, and that Flash does work on x86 versions of Linux. However, unhacked versions of the iPhone don't have Flash capabilities.
The iPlayer hack released on Thursday can run on Linux, Windows and Mac operating systems, Battley claimed, and circumvents Windows-based digital rights management. Legitimate iPlayer downloads expire after a fixed time-period of 30 days on a PC.
The BBC had not responded to a request for comment at the time of writing. However, in its story announcing the iPlayer had been fixed, the BBC stated it expected people to hack the iPlayer again.
Comments
There are 2 comments. Join the discussion
1. Karen Challinor
and more license payers money gets spent to plug the hole again
I will reiterate my argument for those who have missed it
if a programme has been transmitted someone will have a copy probably broadcast quality on a DVD or their computer
so adding DRM to downloads of a transmitted tv programme are a waste of time, effort and money
not adding DRM would effectively make viewing such material, platform and viewer independent thus saving the money spent on the development of the iPlayer downloader and the iPlayer viewer and no one would be complaining that they couldn't view content on their platform
unfortunately someone has made a decision that DRM is the way to go, indeed some of the people that make the programmes don't want downloads of their content without DRM despite the fact that once it has been broadcast it is a waste of time, these people would look rather foolish were DRM to be dropped
so effectively it's costing license payers money to allow some executives to save face
and I for one object to that particular use of my tv license money
2. Julian Nicholls
The BBC clearly don't understand the problem. Once the content is being displayed on your screen, it's there to be saved on your disk entirely unencrypted / DRM'ed.
I suspect that is how the DRM removal tools work, they effectively play the DRM'ed video stream to themselves and save the resulting video.