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?
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
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!
MSE just means they are using DASH to funnel video into the <video> element. Those video chunks are normally unencrypted.
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.
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.
Almost like Flash used to be :)
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.