July 26th 2009 addition: I’m being disingenuous here, Dave Johnston has created a free Android application called Beebplayer which you can grab from the marketplace. It’s fantastic! It gives you access to the standard mobile streaming encodes the BBC provide which work great but don’t match the quality of the encodes provided for the iPhone. This guide focusses on getting a copy of an iPlayer video for viewing off-line in a format which is just about as good as you could want quickly.

The bbc provide access to iPlayer for the iPhone but not via flash, they actually provide a http stream with h264 video and AAC audio in it. Hang on! The G1 could play that!!!! Read on to find out how to do it.

Well, it can’t – not directly. The BBC have encoded their programmes for iPhones in a friendly format of 480×270 (16:9 widescreen), 400Kbps H.264 video and 116Kbps AAC audio which the G1 can play fine.

The problem is that the .mov container is slightly different to the .mp4 container in how it stores AAC audio and the G1 won’t play the audio on the device.

I’ve attached a package to help you download and convert programmes from iPlayer for the G1.

* Unzip it somewhere
* Find the programme you want on iPlayer and navigate to the screen that shows the flash movie, ready for you to click play
* Run the program ipdl.exe ( by Paul Battley – he maintains this actively so if you have problems, get the updated ipdl.exe from there ), paste in the url from your web browser and then click download
* Choose where you want the file to download and wait for it to complete
* Drag the .mov file you have downloaded over onto the convert.bat file
* The batch file will strip the raw video and audio out and recombine into an Android friendly mp4 file!

The length of the download depends on the length of the BBC programme but the conversion at the end is very quick as no re-encoding is required. As a result, the quality is as good as it can possibly be for the G1.

Enjoy!