The puzzling part, for me, is that iPlayer already happily serves plain H.264/AAC within MPEG-4 to mobile devices. Having removed Flash from my MBP a few months ago, the simplest means of accessing iPlayer for me, when not on the iPad, is just having OmniWeb identify as an iPad to the BBC.
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"
I was excited for this, only to find that it doesn't support Safari on OS X. I truly do not understand why not. It already works on iOS, which presumably uses the same webkit. Safari is the default browser on OS X where flash doesn't come pre-installed; but yay, it works with Chrome on OS X which already has flash baked into it.
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.
Because it is still using a plugin. It's just that the plugin only handles decryption and display of video content now, and is called a Content Decryption Module (CDM) rather than "Flash".
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).
I can't verify as I get "BBC iPlayer TV programmes are available to play in the UK only." And I'm really not in the UK, that's true. Are there any links that aren't UK only and fully use the new technology?
This is a bit misleading. The "plugin" you mention is not something the user installs - it is usually bundled with the browser or OS.
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.
A plugin designed to conceal what your computer is doing from you and make it work against you is by definition insecure and dangerous.
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.
The tech companies know that DRM is pointless. The problem is that they don't get to decide to not use it: it's the content producers who insist on inane maximal DRM, and refuse to let companies license/broadcast the material without it.
As was once explained to me by someone with very close ties to iPlayer, it's because these are the requirements that the production companies of the programmes they broadcast insist upon. This extends to their own output due to rights issues, as much of it is licenced out to their commercial arms too.
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.
I thought licensing music wasn't an issue with many BBC shows as long as they could be fairly categorized as Documentary.
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.
Running Firefox 43 here. Either I'm doing something wrong or it's not compatible with my installation of Firefox. I've opted in for HTML 5 video, but when I attempt to play a news video, I am still prompted to install Flash Player.
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.
Not sure how it works for not UK users, but if you accessing BBC from UK, main menu at the top has `IPLAYER` button [0]. Any program I choose from there will use HTML5. Anywhere else, that includes news videos and live TV, HTML5 is not an option.
> However, we’ve been regularly evaluating the features offered by the most popular web browsers and we’re now confident we can achieve the playback quality you’d expect from the BBC without using a third-party plugin.
I think that this is an excellent example of the pathetic state of HTML 5 and web UI in general. All they want to do is play video with some UI around it. It's 2015, that should be almost trivial. But it's not. It's beta and broken in some OS's.
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?
I disagree with how you've framed this. When you say "All they want to do is play video with some UI around it." that is solved, it's fairly easy and works fine.
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.
Just to clarify, I'm using the CLI 'youtube-dl' tool to grab shows, which works really well across many different sites and services. I'm not watching BBC iPlayer shows in YouTube. Here's their site: https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/
Also, the reason that you aren't getting the HTML5 player is because Firefox on Linux only supports MSE + WebM, not MSE + MP4. It has nothing to do with EME.
The simple answer is the browser as a platform stalled for ten years or so (the "Flash Era"). It's only very recently that real work was put into adding new capabilities like video playback (See the WHATWG conflict). Beyond that, I would add that the natural complexity of video encoding and the legalities which surround it complicate things. The video playback implementation bundled into the browsers is simpler than what you might find in something like VLC, making it a bit less capable of handling all the potential oddities a video can have. You have to actually encode your video in multiple formats, and even then be very careful, to get it to actually play in every browser at the moment. Hopefully these things will stabilize in the near future, but it's early days.
> 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!
"Just" video in HTML5 is actually trivial. You just put a video in a <video> element and you're set. Maybe put multiple resolutions in and a button to switch out the src. If you want the additional compression of VP9, you can put both a WebM source and a MP4 source in the <video> element and the browser will pick the better one, no Javascript required.
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.
the problem is, they don't want to "just" play video. On Flash they've been using a technology called HLS/HDS which does things like very the bitrate of the video depending on the speed of the connection, it's not just a matter of putting a video tag on a page.
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.
If they listed a specific version, from where would you download it? My current Chrome is "45.0.2454.101 (64-bit)" but I couldn't tell you if my life depended on it what version I had last week (44? 45.023? who knows?).
I'll be very happy when this is available for live streams. But I preferred the PLS streams for audio which were seemingly disconnected a year or two ago.
Could the headline be changed? It's not the same as the original headline, and trial is not a verb, except as a very recent (post 1990) colloquialism. Verbing nouns is annoying, particularly when there are perfectly good words to use: "try" or "test".
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.
BBC is state funded yet it competes with all the other big companies to become as technologically obsolete as possible. The story of get_iplayer is a testament to this.
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?
> BBC is state funded yet it competes with all the other big companies to become as technologically obsolete as possible.
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.
The BBC absolutely understand the implications of the technology choices they make, think back to their Olympic coverage.
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.
The BBC doesn't produce all of the TV that it shows, a lot of it (at a very rough estimate, maybe 50-70%) is made by private production companies, which are commissioned by the BBC, part-commissioned in collaboration with other companies (for instance, HBO and BBC jointly produced Rome, The Tudors, The Casual Vacancy, Parade's End, etc) or bought in from abroad.
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.
I don't understand what you mean either. The BBC had to protect the content they were delivering or content creators likely wouldn't allow it on the service.
Presumably they shut down RTMP streams because open source clients were delivering content outside the UK. Seems reasonable to me.
Having actually spoken to some of the people who work on this stuff at the BBC, they don't want to. They want to make as much quality television accessible to as many people as possible.
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?)
Content creators care about publishing schedules and expiry dates - how long the content is available on iPlayer. That's their primary concern.
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.
The BBC is not state-funded. The BBC is funded by the licence fee, which is not compulsory. If you don't have a TV and don't watch live broadcasts online, you don't have to pay it. (I don't.)
Actually I'm surprised they don't require some sort of login for iplayer rather than just limiting by Geo-IP, allowing VPN-using non-license-fee-payers to get the content.
They would also get the option to charge non UK residents for access. There must be good reason they don't do this but it would certainly mean UK residents could access content while abroad without having to pretend they were at home and stop non UK residents 'cheating'. Would love to hear from the BBC if this is being considered.
There are plenty of people who watch TV in the UK without paying the license fee, to say nothing of the Internet. I'd bet that the percentage of non-license payers who use iPlayer is higher, due to cord-cutting.
Given that they effectively are the content creator for a large proportion of their programming they could easily provide DRM free downloads of their self-produced or self-commissioned programming. They choose not to because they want to sell the rights to the programs later. Given that they are largely state funded there is an argument that we as UK citizens are being double charged for content when we (1) pay our license fee for the BBC and (2) later have to purchase a Netflix membership to view older programming.
@jamesbaxter:
"Under the BBC’s existing commissioning quota system, 50% of corporation’s output must be made in-house and 25% by indies, while both compete for the remaining 25%, which is known as the WoCC."
Source: http://www.broadcastnow.co.uk/news/bbc-trust-strong-case-for...
My [cynical] view is that people in the BBC tend to work through a production company so they can profit from the BBC rather than the BBC producing the show as a public producer that merely pays wages. They can then lock up IP in their own company rather than being the BBC's work-for-hire employees.
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??
Even if we are being double charged perhaps it's worth it. If the BBC makes enough money selling content to other distributors it can use it to fund new content.
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"