The everyday BBC iplayer junkie can simply go to http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer and listen to his/her favorite program. Here’s how you can download your favorite show, listen to it offline. or take it with you on your music player.

The gist of it is: visit the show in your web browser and view the page source. Then look for a url with “.ram” in it. Then all you need to do is to download that file. Once you have the Real media file, you can re-encode it to any format.

I’ve spelled it out for you:

Extracting the Real Player (RAM) file for any show on BBC iplayer

Step 1: Visit the program in your browser

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Step 2: View the page source (Page > View Source on IE8)

Step 3: Look for the words “.ram” (without quotes, of course)

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Step 4: Copy the URL you just found

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Step 5: Download that file

There are many ways to do this. The easiest is to download www.flashget.com and use it to download the RAM file. 

Taking the show on the road

Now that you have a collection of shows (RAM files), you want to take it with you. Burn it to a cd, your ipod or mp3 player. If you have a player that can play or stream RAM files, you’re done. If you dont, you need to re-encode your show. Again, there are many free ways to do it, I would recommend: Magic Ram to MP3 Converter.