BBC iplayer (http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/) allows users to access TV and radio programmes from the last 7 days. Most are only streamed, but an increasing number can be downloaded and viewed offline using Adobe Air. If you haven't got Adobe Air installed, clicking on the 'download' button starts the installation process, first of Adobe Air, and then of the iplayer application.

After the installation, the iplayer application should then prompt you for access to kwallet (or keyring on gnome), and the requested programme will be downloaded.

This doesn't work with KDE 4.2.4 on opensuse 11.1 or KDE 4.2.2 on Kubuntu 9.04. Adobe air and the iplayer application are both installed, but there is no prompt for kwallet, and clicking on the download button post-installation evokes no response. However, if the user subsequently switches to gnome on opensuse 11.1 or Ubuntu 9.04, then the iplayer application works as it should and programmes can be downloaded.

I have tested this out on different machines running opensuse 11.1, kde and gnome, and ubuntu/kubuntu 9.04, with the same results.

Other Adobe air apps seem to work ok - I downloaded some samples and ran them without problems.

I haven't found any other postings on this issue, so would appreciate it if someone could confirm the problem - and suggest a solution!

kingjohnii wrote:Other Adobe air apps seem to work ok - I downloaded some samples and ran them without problems.

I'm not in the U.K. (hate region checks!) so I can't really check this issue with this particular program, but have you checked whether other air-apps that wants to access kwallet works? Thwirl for example?

Air and kwallet integration itself should work (it does for me at least, OpenSuse 11.1 64bit, KDE 4.2.90) but in order to see if it's a iPlayer problem or a more general problem it would help to know if other air-apps don't play well with kwallet on your system.

Please ensure in KWallet configuration you have not "Forbidden" Adobe Air permission to access its services.

Kryten2X4B wrote:

kingjohnii wrote:Other Adobe air apps seem to work ok - I downloaded some samples and ran them without problems.

I'm not in the U.K. (hate region checks!) so I can't really check this issue with this particular program, but have you checked whether other air-apps that wants to access kwallet works? Thwirl for example?

Air and kwallet integration itself should work (it does for me at least, OpenSuse 11.1 64bit, KDE 4.2.90) but in order to see if it's a iPlayer problem or a more general problem it would help to know if other air-apps don't play well with kwallet on your system.

I think I may have solved it.
From threads elsewhere it seems that others have had problems with adobe air accessing kwallet/gnome-keyring, particularly when switching from one desktop to another, so I wanted to ascertain whether the presence/absence of gnome on my kde4 system made any difference. I thus set up in vmware a kde4.2 system with no gnome desktop, a clone of that with gnome-keyring installed, and finally one with full kde4 and gnome desktops. In each case, I was able to download and install both adobe air and the bbc iplayer desktop, and use it with kwallet. The same went for other apps that required access to kwallet, which wouldn't work on my system either.

So, it seemed as if there was something peculiar to my system. After much de-installing and re-installing and comparing results in kde4 and gnome, I eventually realised that the one thing that wasn't happening was adobe air prompting for the kwallet password. For some reason, adobe air didn't start up kwallet, but if I started kwallet manually and then the iplayer desktop, it all worked fine, with a prompt for the password.

So, the solution was to put kwallet manager in the autostart directory together with the iplayer desktop. Then on logging on, adobe air prompted for the password, and it all worked. It's not entirely satisfactory as I would prefer not to run things at startup that I'm not using during that session, but that's something to work on![hr]

bcooksley wrote:Please ensure in KWallet configuration you have not "Forbidden" Adobe Air permission to access its services.

bcooksley wrote:Please ensure in KWallet configuration you have not "Forbidden" Adobe Air permission to access its services.

Yes it does have permission - it just wasn't running when it should do. See my reply to the other posting

I am new to KDE but would like to say my bit about Iplayer on ubuntu 9.10
I run AMD64 9.10. I have followed the Adobe installation for getting Air to work in 64 bit (although some net articles say that AMD not supported by Adobe)
I have run Iplayer ok but now it crashes firefox as soon as video content tries to load. I have Flashplayer 10 installed.
This article says a lot about Kwallet being the problem, but to a novice about Kwallet it doesn't say how to open a wallet for Adobe air to access.

Iplayer is installed via the Air Installer and I have got one down to work but I can't get anymore content. I have tried running Firefox as sudo from terminal but I just get a blank screen where the content of the video should be and then very soon (.5 to 2 seconds) firefox closes

Konqueror fails with an error for the nsplugin

There seem to be so many possible places where the problem could be
is it flashplayer? is it Air ? is Kwallet? is it firwfox?

Had it running perfectly on Ubuntu 9.04
Any help would be great
Phil

Try running Firefox in Konsole ( type "firefox" ) and post the output here.

not much help I'm afraid
if I start firefox from a normal user, runs ok on web pages until I access www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer then closes down with Segmentation Fault
trying again as sudo loads ok, plays programs ok, BUT as soon as I try to download a program it comes up with the Install Iplayer ( although it is installed) the Iplayer Installer badge displays forever! on right clicking it and checking the flash setting adobe page loads saying flash 10 ok
on Exit of firefox no errors given in terminal
no mention of kwallet
I have tried unistalling Adobe Air several times, and run through all the 64 bit instructions several times. Air says it is loaded.Air will load the saved iplayer .air file. desktop icon is installed but will Iplayer will not download anything.

Can I delete all kwallets and try again?
thanks anyway.
Phil

Please post the output of "ldd /usr/lib/firefox/firefox"

phil@phil-desktop:~$ ldd /usr/lib/firefox/firefox
ldd: /usr/lib/firefox/firefox: No such file or directory
phil@phil-desktop:~$

same result if am sudo

I am trying to install again at the moment. Thanks phil

I just uninstalled iplayer and then tried to install in konqueror
I visited www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer
then chose a program to view
the program content started but the download option never appeared result is pasted below
I was sudo when trying this



phil@phil-desktop:/$ konqueror
QPainter::begin: Widget painting can only begin as a result of a paintEvent
QPainter::translate: Painter not active
QPainter::setClipRect: Painter not active
<unknown program name>(9747)/ main: 2 - parseCommandLine
<unknown program name>(9747)/ main: 3 - create KApplication
QPainter::begin: Widget painting can only begin as a result of a paintEvent
QPainter::translate: Painter not active
QPainter::setClipRect: Painter not active

(<unknown>:9747): Gdk-CRITICAL **: gdk_window_get_origin: assertion `GDK_IS_WINDOW (window)' failed

(<unknown>:9747): Gdk-CRITICAL **: gdk_window_get_origin: assertion `GDK_IS_WINDOW (window)' failed

Nothing severe is in that output. Note that you should not run KDE applications as root.

After several more attempts I am not going to waste too much more time on this
As the BBC iplayer is such a major App I am surprised a Deb for all i386 and AMD 64 was not included in Ubuntu 9.10
So many factors could be at fault

I am using the terminal app get_iplayer which just works with no fiddling about. Thanks for everyone's help but I am going sailing!!

There is a lovely script, located in the Ubuntu repo, called 'get-iplayer'. It's a console script, but it will find and download iPlayer shows!

There's also a GUI for it as a Kommander script...

If you cannot get Adobe Air to work, get_iplayer (a command line program) will do what you want; the instructions are on the site but you only need the commands to list the available programs:
get_iplayer --type=<type> <keyword> which will list all the available tv or radio programs with the keyword in their title and their programme numbers and to download the programme
get_iplayer --get <programme number> --output <filename>