BBC Brings DRM-Free Content To Linux Users 131
eldavojohn writes "The BBC is planning to release some of its programmes to users of GNU & Linux. You won't see Doctor Who or Dragons' Den on there anytime soon, but they have been working with Canonical & Collabora on getting this out there for Totem users. The developer blog mentions that the sheer number of options in the open source world actually makes this difficult to accomplish."
Re:I hope they made the freedom choice. (Score:3, Interesting)
The thing is, when people are faced with more than two choices, they tend to panic and dither and get put off. It's surely a bug in the way the human mind is designed, but given that the original maintainer seems to have gone quiet for a while, I don't think a patch will be forthcoming. So we have to work around the bug. One way to do that is to reduce the number of choices that have to be made, or at least, as the Python folk say, 'There should be one obvious way to do it'. Even if what you end up with is technically inferior to one of the options that could have been chosen (and let's face it, the C language, X11, Qwerty keyboards, SMTP, and pretty much everything else is less than perfect), there is massive value in simply eliminating the number of decisions a developer has to make.
I realize this isn't quite a direct reply to what you wrote, but I felt like a bit of a rant anyway :-p.
Must we use Totem? (Score:2, Interesting)
Nice first step, but I just don't like using GTK apps if I can help it, because they look out of place. The only GTK app I really make an exception for is Firefox, and thankfully that is getting a QT4 port from Nokia.
Is there any chance someone could develop a Firefox extension, or a plugin for Kaffeine, Amarok, etc?
Re:I hope they made the freedom choice. (Score:3, Interesting)
TFA said that other distros will be worked on. They chose to start with Ubuntu as it appears to be the most popular desktop(Joe user) distro.
Joe the User supports Microsoft, even though his current computer and the computer he's thinking of buying would benefit more from Ubuntu. :p
Re:amazing! (Score:5, Interesting)
i didn't even know that brits had computers yet. it's fantastic news.
Yep.. After inventing them, they kinda lost interest..
Re:Little new? (Score:3, Interesting)
Or.. you use "lossy" encryption.
The quickest link I could find there was this one [derkeiler.com].
That fails "best for the consumer", because now I'm getting a degraded product -- and yet, once we know it's being done, it's usually possible to circumvent.
But if you can do non-lossy watermarking, or if it actually doesn't impact quality (for example, it is applied during the encoding process, and produces no lossier output than without it), I have no problem with it. Still possible to circumvent, but impossible to be sure that it's circumvented until you release enough copies for them to check the watermark. At the same time, it doesn't affect legitimate use.
I generally categorize watermarking outside of DRM, however -- it's the only kind of "DRM" which doesn't also require specific software to play the media back. And it's that requirement for specific software that is what bothers me the most about DRM. (After all, I don't mind Steam so much, because you already need specific software (the game itself) to play any games. But I want to play my media on anything that has the right codecs.)