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.'"
Open, or Untested? (Score:5, Interesting)
The Ogg/Vorbis format is often touted as completely free and unencumbered by patents, but is it? Is Dirac?
Have any free formats ever been taken to court and won, proving their status as truly free? Or are they 'under the radar' at the moment, not worth testing in court because they've not reached critical mass yet?
I ask because I actually don't know. I'd like to see truly free formats, but I'm not sure if they are, or if people just think they are.
Dirac Codec (Score:2, Interesting)
Sorry to post as AC but I've lost a domain and can't get my password back (yet).
The Beeb have been toying with this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirac_(codec) (many links on page) since 2004. The biggest problem it has is a lack of optimisation now slowly being solved. It is supposed to be patent un-encumbered, open source and about as "free" as software from a large, commercial organisation is likely to get.
If they were _serious_ about this maybe they should take on some C/asm coders under contract (nudge nudge) to further optimise and, very importantly, app developers to build content tools, conversion utilities and a web browser based plugin.
For web apps this should be no more inconvenient than downloading, say, Flash, Silverlight or Quicktime (stop complaining at the back)
The next problem is content. The BBC has tonnes of it. I suspect corporate inertia is behind the lack of adoption (it frequently is). Someone start kicking some arse at the Beeb please.
http://www.burnttoys.net/cv
BBC Ogg Vorbis Support (Score:2, Interesting)
The BBC supported OGG Vorbis long before any other mainstream news organization did. I'd take them at their word on this one.
Re:Patent free for the BBC (Score:5, Interesting)
That's what I was thinking, but upon checking found that a recent High Court decision might allow software patents after all. There's certainly a lot of confusion over the subject and an apparent disparity between the UK Patent Office and the European Patent Office. See the IPKat blog [blogspot.com]:
The blog post mostly echos the press release from the UK Patent Office [ipo.gov.uk], who plan to appeal due to the judge failing to apply the Aerotel/Macrossan test.
So it does seem that, medium to long-term, the BBC might have made a big mistake.
As for software patents in general, I believe the only way to truly be rid of the scourge is to get the US to declare software as unpatentable. The US government, and the lobbyists from its companies have tremendous power and influence around the world, and they are pushing hard for software patentability. Even though it's obviously a bad idea, and most software developers are strongly opposed to it, more [michaeldolan.com] countries [nosoftwarepatents.com] seem to be considering it. No real sources for this last paragraph as it's only my opinion, take it or leave it. :)
Re:BBC Ogg Vorbis Support (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:These are not the droids you're looking for (Score:5, Interesting)
And it's a very foolish or brave legislator who'd try to tamper with these regulations.
Re:How can the BBCs licence model work over the ne (Score:5, Interesting)
All you need is a UK machine you can ssh to.
ssh -D 3128 host.co.uk
then set up a socks proxy at localhost:3128, and you can stream as much as you like. Fortunately there's a thriving UK internet industry so a shell account / virtual server / dedicated server / beowulf cluster shouldn't be too hard to find.
Re:It's the ads that kill the BBC clips (Score:3, Interesting)
Are you, by any chance, complaining? If so, you're just another freeloading idiot that expects somebody else to serve you completely free content. Sorry, but capitalism doesn't work that way. Moron.
Re:Whining (Score:5, Interesting)
Although I agree in part with you, there are a number of problems with what you say.
".h264 and AAC both cost so little for the BBC and any partners that using OGG/OGM would actively cost them more due to the inferior video compression."
"The BBC have made great strides with their own video codec even if it's not quite ready."
These two statements show the problem nicely. The BBC actually funds its own video codec specifically for archiving its video archives (which, eventually, it hopes to allow access to directly on the Internet - there's a quote somewhere if you look for it). This codec is already very good, completely free (and patent-free which is much more important for the BBC) and the cost to "finish it off" (which at this point is minor bug-fixing and bundling into a nice WMP-codec DLL / mplayer plugin etc.) is negligible to anything that they could buy - no matter how cheap. They could do it tomorrow.
However, all they ever seem to do is cut back on Dirac and spend on other technologies. If Dirac's a failure then, to paraphrase yourself, they "have an obligation to the license payer" to cut it. If it's not, they really should be using it in place of a pay-for patented codec. It was designed with this sort of thing in mind and, if memory serves, was designed so that multiple "quality levels" could be easily made from the same streams to allow streaming over a very slow connection and professional-quality distribution/archival. Hell, have Dirac in all downloads for the iPlayer software and use something else for the Flash streams. It would still save money. And there's an precedent...
"iPlayer eats insane amounts of bandwidth and if they can shrink videos down at all whilst maintaining quality it's in the BBC's best interests."
Yes. Then they add the Wii to it, but only in the codec it's compatible with, which takes up 4x the bandwidth of the normal iPlayer streams. Thus, this argument is dead on it's feet. They actually put out an entirely seperate encoded file just for Wii (the most popular games console ever?) on every single video they have, sucking up 4x the bandwidth each time they are used. They also realise that real-time Flash-based streaming is dependent on peak hours and thus puts a massive dent into their bandwidth bill to cope with that peak-time, non-peer-to-peer surge. The other day they put the entire movie of Chicken Run on BBC iPlayer Flash streams and I had it playing in the background.
But they can't write a Linux frontend (even if closed source) for already-existing code to solve this problem (and thus relegate real-time Flash streaming to a second-class method of delivery) or solve the "DRM problem" on Linux. Hell, speak to Nintendo and get iPlayer software bundled with the next Wii update - the more Wii use, more Wii's plugged into the TV all the time, the more bandwidth shared and the closer world Wii domination is.
"That's not even taking into account the number of consumer devices that have hardware .h264 decoding compared to Theora."
"Would cost HW manufacturers a lot to add support for a format that's barely used."
Hardware-decoding is neither here nor there - modern PC's can brute force their way through any iPlayer stream without even breaking a sweat. Even consoles can handle the streams properly - my 600MHz Thinkpad on Linux without video acceleration laughs at the Flash streams and can play full-screen video of that type (800x600 DivX's, DVD's etc. don't worry it at all, even streamed over wireless). There aren't many (any?) HD streams available on iPlayer or broadband connections capable of making this an bottleneck.
However, what you say has an element of truth in that they would have to make a way to play those streams available to the non-techy public. Like, say, an iPlayer app. Hmmm...
"OSS types complained when the BBC made iPlayer windows only at first (even though they always said it was in development for more platforms) but the BBC still responded by speeding up the
Re:How can the BBCs licence model work over the ne (Score:2, Interesting)
Okay, so the BBC do need some way of getting their iPlayer on to Linux and other OSes
If you can get Flash to work, you can view the iPlayer content: www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer [bbc.co.uk]. I do it all the time using Camino on OS X. To be honest I find this preferable to a P2P model anyway, although obviously the usual dire warnings about it overloading the intertubes as more people catch on apply.
Agree with you 100% about it being advert-free, too. I'm Canadian by birth and every time I go over to visit family, watching TV is like an exercise in self-control. I swear to Science the ratio of adverts:content is 1:1.
Re:And conversely (Score:4, Interesting)
I think it's even more complex than that as there are commercial arms within the BBC in charge of flogging the content. One part wants to move heaven and earth to get as much content out in as many ways as possible - the other half wants you to buy it on DVD.
It's a lot more complex than that.
The other half wants you to buy it on DVD but is only prepared to make the DVD available if there's sufficient commercial demand.
Furthermore, I'm given to understand that even a television programme produced entirely inhouse can be an absolute nightmare for licensing. Incidental music is licensed for use in the original broadcast and has to be relicensed or edited out if the programme is released on DVD, repeated or somehow rebroadcast (eg. through iPlayer). Similarly, actors, writers and journalists often retain some of the rights over their work and will want more money if the BBC wants the rights to release the show on DVD or repeat the show indefinitely. Not, therefore, something you write into the initial broadcast license unless you're pretty sure it's something that will be worth releasing on DVD.
Re:h.264 and patent licencing (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Patent free for the BBC (Score:3, Interesting)
I was quite pleased to discover this - it gives me an easy-to-understand example I can use when talking to politicians about software patents.
Re:Whining (Score:5, Interesting)
The BBC have NO obligation to anyone, especially people who don't pay licence fee, to produce or adopt open source software. Their obligation is to provide good value for money whilst providing the best service to licence payers.
No. The BBC have exactly one obligation - to uphold their charter. Please read their charter. It makes no distinction between license payers and non-payers. It only talks about providing services to people in the UK. You don't need a license fee to listen to BBC Radio, but they still have obligations to radio listeners.
One of these obligations is to make their programming available to the greatest number of people. This is easy with analogue TV and Radio, since anyone can build a TV or Radio capable of receiving the BBC's content. With the iPlayer, it's different. Imagine I want to build a mobile device that can be used to access iPlayer content. If I'm someone like Apple, then I just release the device and the BBC (for some reason) implement a special-case front-end for my device. But if I'm a small player just entering the market, I can't. This harms innovation in the UK. If the BBC used an open standard, I could create a service that grabbed their content and transcoded it to something that would play on my phone's tiny screen (for example). Or I could transcode it on my PC to play on my 770 easily.
It is not the BBC's job to favour one or more manufacturers in the market. Imagine if they had decided in the '60s that they would only allow Sony TVs to receive colour TV signals. Would you consider this to be acceptable?
Except they are moving to H.264... (Score:1, Interesting)
It is only 3 days old, but there was a post on the BBC tech blog about moving to H.264. From this week they are starting to encode in H.264.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/bbcinternet/2008/08/bbc_iplayer_goes_h264.html
Which was published 2 days before the article and only 2 hours 20 mins after the originally linked blog entry. Bit quick to fly off the handle?