There are often posts on this forum asking about the best radio and TV programmes to listen to or to watch as a beginner, and many posts suggesting relevant and interesting programmes. Fortunately S4C and Radio Cymru offerings are available on iPlayer but I’m sure that I am not alone in wanting to keep some of the material mentioned for the future or for when my skills have developed sufficiently to appreciate it better. You may feel that, as iPlayer content usually expires after 30 days, this is not possible.
The good news is that there is a way of downloading it to your computer and saving it. Legally (providing that you have a TV licence if you are in the UK).
A free program called “get_iplayer” does this and runs on Linux/BSD (numerous distros supported), MacOS (10.10+) and Windows 7, 8 and 10 (XP and Vista are not supported).
Windows users can download the latest version from: https://github.com/get-iplayer/get_iplayer_win32/releases/latest.
MacOS users can download the latest release from: https://github.com/get-iplayer/get_iplayer_macos/releases/latest.
For both Windows and Mac users the installer includes all necessary bits and pieces.
Linux users will need to install the packages individually and instructions can be found at https://github.com/get-iplayer/get_iplayer/wiki/unixpkg or it can be done manually as describe at https://github.com/get-iplayer/get_iplayer/wiki/unix.
This program was originally developed to run on the Linux operating system, so may appear “old fashioned” to some, in that it uses the command line, where you have to type apparently obscure commands into a black screen to make it do anything. Fortunately a slightly more friendly means of accessing it has been created as well. This is the “PVR” that the instructions mention and this is included in the installation process for Windows and Mac users.
There is a full set of instructions at https://www.squarepenguin.co.uk/.
Once the program has gone from the iPlayer website you won’t be able to get it so you need to actively download episodes of a series on frequent basis if you want them all.
Best of luck,
Steak&Eggs
P.S. What the instructions don’t say is that sometimes a search of the listing of available programmes doesn’t find a programme that you can see on the iPlayer website. In such cases you can still download the program. You will need to find the PID, an identifier usually starting with a ‘p’ followed by another seven alphanumeric characters, in the page’s URL. For example it is p0679x84 in this example: https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p0679x84/y-ditectif-cyfres-3-pennod-6
The command to download this programme will be: get_iplayer --pid=p0679x84
I can’t see a way of doing this using the PVR so you will need to use the command line if you want to do this.