BBC iPlayer begins to trial HTML5 player
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
A sample user agent: "Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; CPU OS 6_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/536.26 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/6.0 Mobile/10A5355d Safari/8536.25"
This is made more irritating by the fact that setting the User Agent to "iPad" on OS X has always yielded a perfectly functional HTML5 player.
That plugin must be closed source and must be ported to any platform that uses it by whoever wrote it (I think Adobe have one, and probably Microsoft too).
In some ways this is a step back from Flash.
A lot of the stuff they show is owned by other companies (films, sports, etc.). They also commission a lot of stuff from outside production companies who want to be able to commercialise it in other ways afterwards (e.g. sell it on to Netflix afterwards, show on repeat channels, etc.).
Other reasons include not owning the rights to things within the show, most notably music.
Eg Top Gear got away with using music from many famous films in almost every show, I thought this is how they were allowed to do that. And their "documentary" status is questionable.
For example, Apple's is called FairPlay. It's automatically embedded in every iOS device, Apple TV, Apple Watch, and Mac. It is able to decrypt the content streamed from approved providers.
Of course, it is closed source, but that does not make it insecure or dangerous. The vast majority of your Mac is closed source and has an awful lot more privileges than FairPlay.
Encyrypted content is trivial to record and redistribute for reasons that Cory Doctorow spelled out to tech companies a decade ago. That those companies are still pretending otherwise is leading to them perverting the operation of network and systems software.
As an aside, am I crazy, or is it weird that neither the blog page or the opt-in page embed a video for testing or even link to a video for testing? I don't know where to find an instance of "iPlayer" on the BBC site (on the off chance that's different than the video player they use for news items).
I searched for what one might call a traditional television program on their home page, but that didn't work either. I clicked the play icon on the "Featured Video" on the home page and was again prompted to install Flash.
I'm happy to hear about the effort, but not yet thrilled with the results.
This is just about EME extensions is it not?
What the heck? Why aren't we at the place where we have, "Oh yeah, playback video - here's the library, used by everyone, rock solid, works everywhere," and off you go. How can things still be this broken?
Almost like Flash used to be :)
In short, blame rights holders.
> started taking advantage of Media Source Extensions via the dash.js project.
That means they're using Javascript to decode encrypted video. It's a ridiculous way to play video. It also is the entire reason for this nugget:
> We plan to continue supporting Flash on the desktop for at least the next few years. This is partly because playing video using HTML5 requires a more powerful computer than Flash, and we don’t want to leave behind those users who cannot, or do not wish to, upgrade.
In the real world HTML5 video does not require a more powerful computer than with Flash. Trying to do it with Javascript is pathetic. If anyone wants to rip your content they still will since it's video playing on your computer. Not to mention it's a publicly owned company!
That would be funny. I hope someone does a side by side measuring cpu cycles, or some other performance metric. My money is on a Flash winner.
MSE just means they are using DASH to funnel video into the <video> element. Those video chunks are normally unencrypted.
iPlayer works for a very large number of people on an enormous variety of platforms. Whatever you're trying to implement across that range is going to produce compatibility problems.
At issue here is DRM and the BBC's need (probably contractually mandated by the rights holders) to control what you can do with their content on your devices. It's about control, not about simple delivery.
I use Linux only and when I visited the opt-in page with Firefox I received the following error message: "Sorry, we can't provide you with the HTML5 Player beta because your browser doesn't support Media Source Extensions. Please try another browser. Only Google Chrome is supported on your platform at this time." Testing the same page with Chromium and it worked fine. I won't use Chrome and won't install Flash so I was pleased to see it working with Chromium.
Looking at the bigger picture, it's still easier for me to use youtube-dl and grab the videos that way. The quality is higher and even on my gigabit fiber broadband, I got some buffering and the frame rate dropped which showed significant tearing in the playback. At least CPU use was much lower than with Flash.
The future isn't Flash, it's HTML5 video and I'm pleased to finally have something that works for us Linux users who don't use Flash. Nice work BBC iPlayer team and if any of you are reading this comment I say thanks.
Edit: formatting
media.mediasource.mp4.enabled = true
get_iplayer - https://squarepenguin.co.uk
As an example, I think 4chan has the simplest possible user submitted video hosting possible. They don't even need an encoding pipeline, they just serve user submitted WebM files < 3MB. It works quite well.
Where it becomes harder is if you want to do complex things, like slice up content in Javascript to insert ads, manually control buffering with Javascript, try to estimate bandwidth, etc. These are harder right now because the MSE API is pretty new and used by very few websites.
http://tunein.com/radio/BBC-Radio-1-988-s24939/
I've heard from a guy who knows a guy that it's super easy to time-shift those streams into a local file, too.
Also, you don't need a licence if you are watching catch-up tv
The HTML5 iplayer works (better) in Firefox on Linux already.
Are we not in post-1990?
[1]: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/3006486.stm [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10016502
They could take a stand against it, but no, they're an attack vector for it.
There are people in the BBC who are as infuriated by this as everyone else. I continue to hope that they will be able to pull some of their more ambitious plans off.
I'm trying to think of companies that understand this but I can only think of GOG. Is there a similar company for films or music?
Presumably they shut down RTMP streams because open source clients were delivering content outside the UK. Seems reasonable to me.
BBC is state funded so it should be easier for it (easier than for a for profit company like GOG) to not be evil.
In fact, internal systems already exist for accessing any BBC programme from the last (n) years. There's also a system for schools and universities that gives you access to the last year or so of programming. It's pressures from external production companies that prevent these from being rolled out to the public.
However, there will always be rights issues until the state has complete ownership over all TV production - which is never going to happen.
(Also - what's 'evil' about content creators wanting to protect their intellectual property and income?)
What exactly is DRM protecting them against? It's not geo-blocking, that's done on the server. There's no "download button" that suddenly appears on iPlayer if the content isn't encrypted. So please remind me what protective benefits DRM brings the rights holders and content creators?
Keep in mind, it's trivial to screen capture video on any half-decent computer. Anyone "determined" enough simply needs screen capture software and then hit record.
I can't find stats on it. Can anyone else?
Shows like Gardeners Question Time (GQT) are stalwarts of BBC programming. The BBC could easily produce it, or commission it from a production company on the basis that it's made direct in to the public domain [in copyright terms]. But that would presumably result in less money to the producers/talent.
There was scandal some time back that BBC were paying "talent" upwards of £1 million per series to do a single show a week. Thing is at the time the talent of course were also the owners of the production company for their show and so the BBC were paying their company some greater amount. The BBC promotion of such independent production companies makes them world ranking sellers whilst there seems no reason that such shows couldn't be produced with only a name change and done under the BBC as producer.
Shows like Graham Norton aren't exactly ground breaking, you get an ex-hospital radio presenter (or whoever) to chat inanely with people who are there to popularise their latest book; you get the interviews because who doesn't want to advertise their film on primetime BBC, it's not rocket science. Why can't the BBC own a show like that? Why isn't Mr Norton, or whoever, employed by the BBC and hired out if they're in demand for other shows?
In short it all seems like a huge nepotistic mess of old-boy networks, and smoke and mirrors rather than a corporation that works for the people using their taxes and license fee money. As if the divisional managers in a corporation got together and said, hangabout we can make our divisions private enterprises and charge the parent company double to do what we do now??
But I'm probably completely mistaken ...
So it's not all that surprising that they end up with the standard industry attitude on a lot of these issues. As frustrating as that is.
They could provide content in completely open formats but then due to contractual restrictions would be limited in what they give.
They could buy all their content outright but then due to financial restrictions they would be limited in what they give.
They are extremely open about the decisions and compromises they have to make.
They do listen to license payer and work hard on their behalf. Recently they worked with license holders to allow downloads as well as streaming on their mobile radio app.
They are not directly state funded, they are independent of the government.
Of all the times to make this comment, in a story about iPlayer is probably not the most sensible time. The BBC invented the whole idea of internet catch up TV. It was the first big delivery of TV or film over the internet. It was launching in 2005, years before Hulu, Netflix or any other equivalent. The technology required to do this (particularly in CDNs) didn't exist and they built up the infrastructure from scratch.
In terms of technology to deliver it, they work with what's there in terms of getting it to as many people as possible.