BBC iPlayer Welcomes Linux (and Macs)

h4rm0ny writes "After previously limiting their iPlayer to only the Windows platform (as we discussed earlier here and here), the BBC's content is now available to UK-based users of Linux and Mac OS X. From their site: 'From today we are pleased to announce that streaming is now available on BBC iPlayer. This means that Windows, Mac and Linux users can stream programs on iPlayer as long as their computer has the latest version of Flash. Another change is that you do not have to register or sign in any more to download programs ...' It seems that the BBC have listened to people who petitioned them for broader support and an open format. Well, Flash isn't exactly open, but its a lot more ubiquitous than Windows Media and Real Player formats."

Defacto DRM

[Anonymous Coward]

For someone who is on a Linux platform without Flash (x86_64), this is no better than a Windows-only iPlayer. Yes, I know there are (kludgy) wrappers that allow you to set up the Flash plugin in Firefox, or you can run a 32-bit Firefox, but what about platforms with no supported Flash player, such as PPC Linux or ARM Linux? Does this work with libswf or Gnash? What about Solaris users or BeOS users? Is their TV license money not good enough to be able to access this programming?

Until they're using open technology, this is a hollow gesture to remove the political and social pressure on them. I just hope that the people who really care don't give up their campaign to make the BBC be open.

BBC Trust and OSC response

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.opensourceconsortium.org/content/view/80/55/ [opensourceconsortium.org]

Misleading summary

[ebcdic]

This is *not* the BBC making iPlayer available for non-Windows platforms. They are only providing a *streaming* service, instead of the ability to download programs, which is what they are using DRM for.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Not a gift horse

[McDutchie]

For what it's worth, I'm a Linux user and avoid proprietary software wherever possible, but I've been taught not to look a gift horse in the mouth, and not to complain when you can't offer an alternative.

It's not a gift horse. Access is restricted (at least in theory) to UK citizens, who have already paid for this service through their TV licence fees.

Re:All Hail the Lowest common denominator

[benbean]

Given that they only let you watch downloaded programmes on your computer anyway it doesn't make much difference to me whether they're stored locally or streamed. As for watching them later, they self-destruct in a few days anyway, so it's still a moot point as far as I'm concerned.

Obviously the ideal is to have a downloadable version that can be watched anywhere for any length of time, but that's not happening any time soon.

Re:Well, that's great...

[Anonymous Coward]

Okay, wwmedia, I take your challenge.

I suggest that the BBC use VLC media player [videolan.org]:

• It is a free cross-platform media player
• It supports a large number of multimedia formats, without the need for additional codecs
• It can also be used as a streaming server, with extended features (video on demand, on the fly transcoding, ...)

It is so good, I do not even need to bold half of my post.

Re:...But it is closed to entire Planet except UK

[IRGlover]

This isn't really comparable to MPAA-type restrictions. In the UK there is a TV licence fee that goes to fund the BBC, this means that if you pay the fee then you have already payed to view the content. In this case the BBC is making the content available to its 'subscribers' via a different route - that's all. People overseas haven't paid the fee, so therefore the BBC doesn't feel obliged to provide access to the content (not to mention the money eventually made through global licensing agreements). The BBC also persecutes people in the UK who it feels may be 'stealing' their content (even though they may not have a TV).

Re:rippage

[caluml]

Or, if you have a DVB card [calum.org]: mplayer dvb://BBC\ ONE -dumpstream, and you get the pure MP2 that your TV sees. You can them encode it down to whatever you like.
I've set up an email address that calls a script which takes the start time, duration, and channel name from the subject of the email, and schedules a cron job for that. Voila. I'm on the other side of the world, and I forgot that I wanted to record Peep Show [calum.org]? (Not from the Beeb, but..) A simple email from anywhere does it.

Re:Well, that's great...

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice solution. The challenge was to provide a media format/container, you provide a player.

Re:Uk only

[Cally]

Because Johnny Foreigner doesn't pay the TV license fee [tvlicensing.co.uk]. Yes, my stunned American friends, we UK-ers have to have a government license to legally watch TV or listen to the radio! We tend to think it's fair exchange for the fantastic programmes they've given us over the years, though, not least Blake's 7 of course ;)

Re:All Hail the Lowest common denominator

[CastrTroy]

Now that they are using flash, wouldn't it be possible to use one of the many flash movie downloaders so that you could store the video and watch it whenever you want. Mind you, flash doesn't provide the best video quality, but it would be good enough for watching on an iPod.

Re:Well, that's great...

[karmatic]

That's not entirely accurate - a lot of it depends on the codecs you use.

I have a demo I like to do where I decode and play back 1080p HD using CoreAVC [coreavc.com], on a 1GHz laptop (downclocked - it's hard to find a PC with a native resolution of 1920x1200 and a clock speed of 1GHz). Yes, it drops some frames, but it's quite watchable.

I also do 320x[240-320] H.264 (full screen) playback on a Treo 650. It's got a 312MHz ARM processor, and 32MB of RAM (~24 available).

None of this is hardware accelerated.

BenchMarks here. [behardware.com] This is an older benchmark; CoreAVC is better now.

Re:Dear BBC and other Tv netowrks or entities.

[MrNemesis]

Or even accept that trying to use "DRM" is rather daft after you have broadcast it in unencrypted near-DVD quality full PAL resolution MPEG2 that can be saved to disk with a £30 TV card.

There, fixed that for you ;)

As a long time supporter of the BBC (or "TV tax" as most Americans like to call it), I'm not quite sure what the insistence on DRM is either. Auntie says their partners (NBC and CBC possibly) demand it for online content, but what pirate in his right mind will bother trying to strip the DRM from a crappily encoded low-res file when the broadcast version went out 7 days earlier, in a far more rippable format? I'm a heavy PVR user (MythTV), and the MPEG2-TS dumps it produces from the DVB-T TV cards are often indistinguisable from the DVD that gets released to the shops (as opposed to most of the commercial channels which don't use as high a bitrate/res as the Beeb).

It's not so much closing the barn door after the horse has bolted as wondering what sort of building you should put in that field where all the horses used to be.

To sum up: complete storm in a teacup. Someone obviously thought that video + internet = 0h teh n03s, pirates! and insisted on a WM DRM solution, without actually thinking through whether it'd do anything to stop serious copying of content.

They should have just gone with the streaming service since day one - heck, it's what they've been doing with radio for years. How much of my license fee has gone up in smoke via the great furnace of Microsoft licensing? Too much for me to not give a shit.

Re:"Values Voters"

[bob.appleyard]

Flash is proprietary. On Linux, there was a bug in Flash 9 on some window managers where only the first click on the flash pane after it had received focus registered as a click. You had to click outside the pane in between every click, which made playing games quite difficult and annoying. They have fixed this bug in a later release, however I as a user was powerless to correct this, as control over the software lay with Adobe.

Flash is a pretty good piece of software. There are some performance issues, but it's ubiquitous and provides a single platform, and is pretty flexible. Your accolades of the software are justified. However, these technical aspects do not affect the legal status of the software.

Re:"Values Voters"

[mr_mischief]

Flash's SWF file format is documented well enough that several other products and open source projects can produce it and some are capable of playing it back. The FLA unpublished save format is basically a memory dump of how the Flash program works with the project, so it's considerably harder to develop outside software to save or load that format.

I know ActionScript, but I prefer to write what little Flash stuff I do in HaXe, for example. There are also Rebol Flash dialect (RSWF), an ActionScript virtual machine assembler called flasm, swfmill, Laszlo, and more.

There are also other graphical programs for Flash publishing. Everything from the Zmag web app to [zmags.com]SWF Quicker by SoThink [sothink.com] and their SWF Easy [sothink.com].

For players, there's at least Gnash, Swfdec, SWF.max [gold-software.com], Eltima's SWF and FLV Player [eltima.com], and IrfanView [irfanview.com] (which is what I use to play Flash games without opening a big memory-hogging browser).

Hell, Adobe's own Flex authoring suite for Flash is supposed to be MPL within a few months [adobe.com]. How much more open do you people want?