BBC's Open Player Claims Not Followed Through 311
ruphus13 writes "BBC's iPlayer was originally built on Microsoft's DRM-protected technology, and has never really been liked by folks like the FSF. The BBC is trying to play nice, though, recently claiming, 'the BBC has always been a strong advocate and driver of open industry standards. Without these standards, TV and radio broadcasting would simply not function. I believe that the time has come for the BBC to start adopting open standards such as H.264 and AAC for our audio and video services on the web.' This article argues that actions speak louder than words, and this is where the BBC falls short. 'The fact that both AAC and H.264 are encumbered with patent licenses that make their distribution under free licenses problematic flies in the face of this definition. It's good to see a major organization like the BBC switching from closely held secretive codecs to more widespread and documented ones. But it would be even better to see them throw their considerable weight behind some truly open formats.'"
h.264 and patent licencing (Score:5, Informative)
h.264 patent licencing applies to devices (and even that is low cost):
http://www.dspr.com/www/technology/technology.htm#H.264 [dspr.com] Licensing Fees
What about Dirac? (Score:5, Informative)
Which is developed by BBC, a cutting edge video standard on the level with H.264 and is free as in speech? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirac_(codec) [wikipedia.org]
Wasn't it supposed to be used in Beijing Olympics?
Re:Which is which? I am confused... (Score:3, Informative)
It's the ads that kill the BBC clips (Score:2, Informative)
I'm yet to see a single clip on BBC's website. They insist on running an ad from one of the major ad sites (might be doubleclick, I'm don't remember) before any clip loads. Since I have blocked most ad sites in my hosts file, the BBC clips never load.
As far as I'm concerned they could very well broadcast them in smoke signal format.
technical limitations? (Score:5, Informative)
I had some email correspondence with a BBC tech shortly after they'd experimented with streaming ogg vorbis. He said they'd concluded that it wasn't sufficiently "scalable". I've never implemented anything on a scale like BBC World Service, so I don't know if there's anything to that or not, but perhaps there are slash dotters with the experience to comment.
When a lot of people complained about CBC pimping for Microsoft they set up streaming ogg vorbis [www.cbc.ca] for Toronto, but they haven't expanded it beyond that. I suppose they figured that was enough of a bone to throw us.
Re:h.264 and patent licencing (Score:1, Informative)
I'm not sure if you were trying to imply that h.264 patent licensing only applies to devices and not software, but if so that's incorrect. Software including h.264 is required to pay royalties of 10-20 cents per copy (modulo various rules). Obviously this makes free software using h.264 impractical, let alone Free software.
Re:Open, or Untested? (Score:1, Informative)
This is the webpage of the author, copyright holder, inventor and owner of both the vorbis codec and the ogg wrapper format:
http://xiph.org/ [xiph.org]
Right there on the very front, it says this:
"The Xiph.Org Foundation is a non-profit corporation dedicated to protecting the foundations of Internet multimedia from control by private interests. Our purpose is to support and develop free, open protocols and software to serve the public, developer and business markets."
What are you thinking about that position is going to challenged in court, exactly, and who would do it?
What exactly is there to challenge?
- The idea itself of a codec has heaps of prior art.
- No other codec is the same format.
- The code is open source and hence can prove its copyright heritage.
Dirac is owned by the BBC itself. The BBC get to say if it is open or not.
Re:It's the ads that kill the BBC clips (Score:4, Informative)
There are no ads whatsoever on BBC iPlayer or any other page on bbc.co.uk.
I have no idea what you are talking about?
Re:It's the ads that kill the BBC clips (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Please change the record (Score:3, Informative)
In other news, Firefox 3.1 and some future version of Opera, will have built-in support of Ogg/Theora:
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roc/archives/2008/08/why_ogg_matters.html [mozillazine.org]
Re:Patent free for the BBC (Score:5, Informative)
As the BBC must have a competent legal department I really wonder what the real reason for their reluctance to use certain codex is.
Personally I'm even more pissed off the Dutch public broadcasters have elected to use some Microsoft product called Silverlight in addition to the existing .wmv streams.
And that with taxpayers money!
Re:Stop Complaining (Score:5, Informative)
The BBC is *not* government run. They are publically funded, but the government has no direct control over their output.
Re:This is mildly offtopic but still apropos... (Score:5, Informative)
It's not so much that you don't pay the license fee but that the various 3rd parties who produce programming for the BBC don't want their foreign market profits affected by allowing people outside the UK to view their shows on the BBC website, rather than on their 'local' TV stations.
Re:What about Dirac? (Score:5, Informative)
From TFA:
Re:Software Patents? (Score:3, Informative)
Except that the UK patent office has been challenged [theregister.co.uk] over their newer policy of not granting software patents and people have had to petition to get it officially unenforceable [number10.gov.uk]. They even granted a patent that the government appealed [bbc.co.uk].
The general angle seems to be that the Patent Office has said they won't issue them, people don't want them, and the government will contest them, yet there are still some flying around.
Re:h.264 and patent licencing (Score:4, Informative)
There are no software patents in the UK which is where the BBC operates and cares about.
You're quite welcome to produce a free software implementation of h.264 and run it in England without any problems.
Re:Stop Complaining (Score:1, Informative)
a license fee that you have to pay if you own any equipment that is capable of receiving a TV signal (e.g. TV, computer, certain mobile devices, etc) or IIRC a radio signal
Not quite! You must both possess (own or rent) the equipment and use it for the purpose of receiving broadcast television signals (such as watching or recording TV). It doesn't apply to radio and it doesn't apply to a TV used solely for non-TV purposes, such as a games console.
Re:Dirac Codec (Score:2, Informative)
There is currently no way to play Dirac files on Linux, without 1994-style patching and compiling of huge swathes of software.
How about `sudo apt-get install gstreamer0.10-schroedinger`?
Took all of two minutes for me to find that, and I'm not even running debian.
Re:Patent free for the BBC (Score:3, Informative)
Why not include it here? Because after 5 years of countering the lies and obfuscation promulgated by the EPO, UKIPO et al here and elsewhere, I had hoped the facts about software patenting in the EU (and UK) would've been pretty well known by now and I'm pretty sick of having to do the basic legwork over and over again. Here's one for you:
http://v3.espacenet.com/textdoc?DB=EPODOC&IDX=GB2437579&F=0 [espacenet.com]
Enjoy!
Re:h.264 and patent licencing (Score:5, Informative)
There are no software patents in the UK which is where the BBC operates and cares about.
You're quite welcome to produce a free software implementation of h.264 and run it in England without any problems.
Not strictly true.
Patents on software have been granted by the UK patent office and while there is some doubt as to how legally enforceable these would be, to my knowledge (IANAL) there has not yet been a test case.
Every couple of years there is an attempt to extend EU law to include allowing software patents - though it hasn't yet succeeded. Whether or not existing patents (which may or may not be enforceable) would magically become valid as a result of this law is again unknown.
Re:who cares? (Score:3, Informative)
The BBC made its own DIRAC codec so that it could keep its standard-def infrastructure but handle high-def camera feeds instead of spending even larger amounts of money tearing out and replacing its infrastructure.
There was another plan, though it appears to have been largely forgotten.
The BBC was at one point seriously considering making large amounts of their archive available over the web:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/tv_and_radio/4441205.stm [bbc.co.uk]
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1548691/BBC-online-archive-could-come-free-with-licence-fee.html [telegraph.co.uk]
At the time this was mooted, most of the available codecs required licensing for the server-side component which handled streaming the media. Which is all well and good.
However, the licensing was charged according to the amount of media (either being made available or downloaded; I forget which). Hence the need for a free codec which could be easily streamed.
Re:Open, or Untested? (Score:5, Informative)
Whilst its impossible (given the broken nature of patent law) to declare OGG Vorbis 100% free, when OGG Vorbis support was added to WinAmp, the legal team at AOL Time Warner did a through due diligence to look for anything that could be an issue for the format. If the legal team of one of the largest media companies on the planet says the format is free, thats about as good as its ever going to get.
Re:How can the BBCs licence model work over the ne (Score:3, Informative)
I'm back on my old 1.5GHz G4 PowerBook at the moment, because my MacBook Pro is broken. On my MBP, with a Core 2 Duo processor, the Flash player took my CPU load up to around 60%. With the 1.5GHz G4, it simply fails - it drops frames all the time and the result is basically unwatchable.
Fortunately, there is the iplayer-dl script, which grabs the H.264 source file. I can then play this in Quicktime or VLC (Quicktime uses more CPU, but does much nicer postprocessing) - it looks better, doesn't drop frames, and my CPU usage is around 50%.
After using iplayer-dl, I have a DRM-free H.264 file with AAC audio that I can watch whenever I want, full screen on a second monitor without the player deciding to leave full screen mode whenever it loses focus (which Flash does). I can also copy it to a mobile device to take with my when I'm away from the Internet. I really wish the BBC would officially support this. Why can't they just offer the files for download for people who can't (or don't want to) use Flash? The fact that On6 is designed for low CPU usage, and the Flash decoder takes twice as much CPU as an H.264 decoder with decent postprocessing (about four times VLC) is just unacceptable.
Re:Stop Complaining (Score:3, Informative)
Rubbish. You can own a TV that can be used to watch TV and so long as it is never switched on, you don't have to pay. I know, because this describes my situation a few years ago.
Open source implementation (Score:3, Informative)
AAC is an open standard, as in the spec is publicly available for anyone.
There are even open source implementations:
- http://www.audiocoding.com/faac.html [audiocoding.com] (encoder)
- http://www.audiocoding.com/faad2.html [audiocoding.com] (decoder)
Re:Whining (Score:3, Informative)
And that's the problem. Either encoding or decoding, you will need a patent license from MPEG-LA. I think that is not going anywhere soon. Anyway, as long as the standard is open, it is fine by me.
If you are decoding in software you do _not_ require a patent licence, since software patents are not legal in the EU.
Re:Patent free for the BBC (Score:3, Informative)
These are directly from the FAQ [diracvideo.org] at the Dirac website :
Do the BBC have patents in Dirac?
No. We did have patent applications in train which included some of the techniques involved in Dirac, but we let those parts that related to Dirac lapse. If we had allowed them to continue, users of the Dirac code would still have been covered in perpetuity by the licence: by letting them lapse, the BBC has no IPR interest in any implementation of Dirac by anyone, based on the Dirac software or not.
Do you infringe any patents?
The short answer is that we don't know for certain, but we're pretty sure we don't.
We haven't employed armies of lawyers to trawl through the tens of thousands of video compression techniques. That's not the way to invent a successful algorithm. Instead we've tried to use techniques of long standing in novel ways.
What will you do if you infringe patents?
Code round them, first and foremost. There are many alternative techniques to each of the technologies used within Dirac.
Dirac is relatively modular (which is one reason why it's a conventional hybrid codec rather than, say, 3D wavelets) so removing or adding tools was relatively easy, even though this may mean issuing a new version of the specification.