v0.5 17/11/2011

This program results from a search for a method to download programs from my 3view Freeview HD recorder.
The recorder exposes all of the recordings using UPNP.
People were coming up with mechanisms using windows media player, and chunks of HTML.

I don't really use windows, and I don't want to use a browser to do this.

I came across the Net::UPNP perl class which includes an example called dms2vodcast,
which I have adapted to my purposes. Thanks to the original author.

Usage:

install Net::UPNP (in debian libnet-upnp-perl), and ffmpeg (optional see --nopost)
some of the debug needs Data::Dumper.
Originally the file download needed the curl utility, I have switched this to the perl core module File::Fetch, this should use the LWP module, if not it will fall back curl or wget.

./3viewdump.pl -s "Case Sensitive Search String" -a <Date of recording YYYYMMDD> [-f 'rss output file']

example:

./3viewdump.pl -s Peppa -a 20101220 [-n]
will download all of the Peppa Pigs from the 20th December 2010, (there are a lot of them)
The -n option (--nopost) turns off the ffmpeg post-processing. 

./3viewdump.pl -s Peppa -a 20101220 -f peppa.rss
will create an rss file with links to the content on the 3view of all of the Peppa Pigs from the 20th December 2010

Note on ffmpeg:
SD files are easier to play if they are passed through ffmpeg, with -acodec=copy and -vodec=copy I find this makes the file easier to play, turn this off with -n or --nopost.
HD files get mangled by ffmpeg, so they are just downloaded raw. I have not found any file metadata that tells me whether a file is HD or SD, so I parse the url of the program for the string 'cofdm_8k-', SD files contain the string 'cofdm_2k-'.

Requires a patched version of ffmpeg, which removes spurious errors.

DONE:
Functions as expected.

ISSUES:
Lots of cruft.
Find a way to 'fix' HD files, this will probably mean waiting for the h264 support in ffmpeg to improve.

TODO:
Improve search
remove debug
Generate plain HTML instead of RSS?