It took a while for me to get round to this but following on from the success of my 4OD and Vista tutorial (see here) I decided to look at getting the BBC iPlayer to work.
It frustrates me greatly that the BBC did not think about making this software Vista compliant. Microsoft issued Beta 1 of Windows Vista back in 2005, the software was released to business in November 2006 so they've had plenty of time to look at Vista compatibility.
Anyway, getting this to work on Vista isn't too tricky. Having read an article from El Reg (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/07/31/iplayer_launch_frustration/) it simply states that changing the User String for IE7 will do the trick. The BBC simply block all IE7 + Vista installations so faking IE7 to work like IE6 will succeed. I found a lovely utility from Microsoft to make this slightly easier. Here are my instructions:
- Obtain your BBC iPlayer login details from http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer
- Download the Microsoft User Agent String Utility and install (link below)
- Launch IE7 from the new "User Agent String Utility" from the start menu (IE7 will impersonate IE6)
- Navigate to the iPlayer pages to download the shows
Thankfully, the IE6 impersonation isn't permanent and is only active from the start menu shortcut. Whenever you want to download a BBC show you must use the impersonated IE7 but for other web pages, launching IE7 normally will remain unaffected.
Happy Hacking!
-james
Microsoft User Agent Utility: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=9517db9c-3c0d-47fe-bd04-fad82a9aac9f&displaylang=en