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The BBC site will use non-flash videos if you browse it on an iPad, but they don't seem smart enough to serve these to you if you use a desktop browser with flash disabled.

Presumably they could implement a non-flash fallback for users but unfortunately they just haven't bothered.

I tried to cheat by modifying my User-Agent to pretend to be an iPad but had no luck...

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I was going to agree with you, but I've just double-checked, and you CAN access video content on the BBC sites on a desktop (MacOS X Safari) by setting your User-Agent to iPad. However, it's important that you've removed Flash completely from your system (using Flash Uninstaller), rather than just disable Flash (hoping to use Click-To-Flash). For some reason, they detect Flash by some kind of file-path-detection code...

That's irritating! I'll have to take a closer look at what they are doing, as I'd like to keep flash around on a click-to-run basis.

I'm surprised that websites can do any kind of file path detection on a client...

What horrible browser lets a website inspect the filesystem without permission?

Browsers give away far too much information: https://panopticlick.eff.org/

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