So since my pled for streaming iPlayer content on the Xbox media centre platform. I've been doing what I can to alert the right people to the effort which is happening in this area. The hope is that once the Xbox media centre hackers get there teeth into streaming iplayer content to the xbox, others will follow suit. I've already heard about Wiidia player project through the blog posts and forum entries. I thought it would be possible to create a mediaplayer through Opera but wow the video going back to August 2007 looks good, so things must be really good now. Specially with the release of a server.
Anyway, about other platforms. The obvious one which will make the management sit up and take notice would be the iphone but that looks like a no go for now. The AppleTV should be able to playback the iplayer streams no problem if apple allow access to the browser, otherwise modified appletv's will find a way. I don't think we have a chance on the Xbox 360 platform but the PS3 should work with a version of Linux installed. PSP and DS I've yet to check and I'm sure windows mobile phones along with Nokia phones will work either now or very soon with iplayer streams.
The problem seems to be the propitery Adobe streaming protocols (RTMP, RTMPT and RTMPS) not to be confused with RTSP. But this is being worked on by the guys at Gnash, who have a working lib for decoding RTMP already but doesn't seem to be in a state where others can take advantage of it? Anyway its all really exciting and also means people doing everything legally. No DRM reverse enginnering, no transcoding and we're not even breaking the Geo-ip rules even. I just hope the prototypes and examples will be enough to keep things as they are on the BBC end of things for a long while. I would hate to see drm being added in the middle of this period of development. I'll certainly do what ever I can to keep the field as open as possible to others and I think the BBC iplayer API will drive even more creativity when it goes live.
Technorati Tags: xbmc, opera, flash, adobe, iplayer, bbc, backstage, backstage.bbc.co.uk, iphone, ds, wii, rtmp, gnash
