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iplayer oh iplayer when can I watch you on my TV?

From the Register via Miles and Dave's emails.

The BBC has revealed that eight times as many people are using its Flash-based streaming iPlayer than the desktop P2P version.

The first publicly available official figures since the Christmas launch say 3.5 million iPlayer programmes were watched by more than one million viewers between 25 December and 7 January.

Even our best friend (for reasons which will be revealed soon) Ashley Highfield has a blog post about this annoucement. Theres even a great quote from someone saying how its changed there life for ever. But what next for iplayer?

People since Christmas have said they would like to see the 7 days extended to 14 days or even 30 days and want the whole range of BBC content available. Only one person said to me they would like it better quality (I just add this person owns a 1080p HD cinema like projector), some say they want iplayer on the TV (this will be solved soon if you own a Virgin box) others including my parents said “iplayer?”

So TV on TV a large request with extended schedule and longer hold time? Humm we shall see but the ability to put iplayer on your TV right now is quite interesting and something I've been trying to push out in the community. Currently the problem is the Adobe RTMP protocal for streaming, but this will soon be fixed. Even Ashley decided to follow up some of the links for IP TV solutions after the lets be frank, boring as hell Mac World announcements (Macbook Air my arse and its not got a replaceable battery!). Yes Apple screwed up the Apple TV and launched a 2nd edition which lets be honest isn't that great because once again its the same hardware. I still can't wait to plonk the xbox or wii in front of Ashley and show him and others iplayer on a TV done well. Thanks for the screenshot of xbmc by the way Ashley.

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Xbox media centre on a linux PC

Xbox media centre on linux

I've made up my mind. Forget the XboX 360 and PS3, they suck for a home entertainment centre. MythTV and Windows Media Centre are too heavy and too focused on replacing the DVR/PVR era of devices. To hell with the seriously underpowered AppleTV and Wii, I might as well stick to the Xbox if I was consider one of those. Nope its all about Xbox media centre on Linux, Mac and even Windows. Jon's experience of the next XBMC is certainly of interest to myself, however Jon doesn't go into details about how to install it.

It's been a long time. I haven't even been an XBMC user since May. In May I got a new HDTV so I needed to move to something that could render my HD content. That path brought me to MediaPortal. The old xbmp fork. And well… its garbage.

I don't mean to sound like an ass, but compared to the codebase of XBMC, MediaPortal is junk. Its full of bugs and just feels terrible. The devs at least know this, and are working on MediaPortal 2. So that should be interesting to watch. But all in all, running my mediacenter on Windows just blew.

So last Saturday I decided to check on XBMC for Linux's progress. And to my surprise it is practically feature complete! It all works! Now, for how long is another question. Lets just say that I wrote a trusty Ruby script to watch for XboxMediaCenter, and if it crashes, it gets relaunched. So yeah, its not really primetime, but it works great and is fast.

So I decided to go check it out myself. First port of call was the xbox media centre linux wiki. For Windows users the easist way to get XBMC is to run VMware's Player and grab the virtual environment images. Theres a few staticly hosted files or a torrent file. There's a whole thread here on setting it all up in VMware. I opted for the compile your own which is detailed in a readme file in the VM image.

The steps are pretty simple for Ubuntu 7.x

  1. # sudo apt-get install subversion
  2. # cd $HOME
  3. # svn checkout https://xbmc.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/xbmc/branches/linuxport/XBMC
    1. For Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn):
      # sudo apt-get install make g++-4.1 gcc-4.1 libsdl1.2-dev libsdl-image1.2-dev libsdl-gfx1.2-dev libsdl-mixer1.2-dev libsdl-sound1.2-dev libsdl-stretch-dev libcdio6 libcdio-dev libfribidi0 libfribidi-dev liblzo1 liblzo-dev libfreetype6 libfreetype6-dev libsqlite3-0 libsqlite3-dev libogg-dev libsmbclient-dev libsmbclient libasound2-dev python2.4-dev python2.4 python-sqlite libglew1 libglew-dev libcurl3-dev g++ gawk x11proto-xinerama-dev libxinerama-dev libxrandr-dev libxrender-dev libmms-dev pmount
    2. For Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon):
      # sudo apt-get install make g++-4.1 gcc-4.1 libsdl1.2-dev libsdl-image1.2-dev libsdl-gfx1.2-dev libsdl-mixer1.2-dev libsdl-sound1.2-dev libsdl-stretch-dev libcdio6 libcdio-dev libfribidi0 libfribidi-dev liblzo1 liblzo-dev libfreetype6 libfreetype6-dev libsqlite3-0 libsqlite3-dev libogg-dev libsmbclient-dev libsmbclient libasound2-dev python2.4-dev python2.4 python-sqlite libglew1.4 libglew1.4-dev libcurl3-dev g++ gawk x11proto-xinerama-dev libxinerama-dev libxrandr-dev libxrender-dev libmms-dev pmount
  5. # ./build.sh
  6. # ../BUILD/Xboxmediacenter

Its not working for me right now, because (I think) Compizfusion is screwing up the display. But I'll know for sure once I try it on another machine. Stay tuned…

IT WORKS! Ok its 4am and I've just got Xbox media centre working on my workstation which doesn't have compizfusion enabled or installed. Like Jon said its all there except 3d and special effects. I found it very slow at larger resolutions and unstable at anything over 800×600 but it could be my cheap onboard graphics or slow single 2.8ghz AMD processor. I've uploaded a load of screenshots on to Flickr before going to bed. More about this when I get home tomorrow.

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iPlayer content on exotic devices

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.

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iPlayer on xbox media centre

xbox media centre

Streamng iplayer has certainly caught on well and everyone I've spoke to has good things to say about it. Although a supporter of the open-ish flash streaming player, I don't use it much right now. Yes not all the content is there yet but its also limited to my laptop and small computer screens. This is insane when I already consume all my media (tv, films, podcasts, etc) through xbox media centre and a nice large screen.

So whats going on? Well xbox media centre can already play native flash files, supports live streaming from day one and has a complete python backend for interacting with websites like youtube and the BBC radio player already . iPlayer should be a logical next step? And you know what if someone did create a script like the BBC Radio player one it would be perfectly legal, acceptable, promotable and great to use. I've been keeping an eye on the iplayers scripters forum but there still on about the download version. Phil really has everything needed for anyone to build the iplayer for xbmc.

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Dave’s thoughts on streaming iPlayer

So right now iplayer has no DRM but there is a fear with the latest Adobe flash communication server, DRM could be switched on in the near future. Now obviously I'm not going say either way as that would be confidental roadmap type stuff which gets me fired but I did think Dave's thoughts were interesting. Here's the best parts…

Sadly I don’t think that the rights holders or the BBC has been convinced that DRM does more harm than good, is unacceptable, and ought to be eliminated. I think they’ve just seen a lot of negative press about DRM, and want to avoid negative press. A streaming DRM-less alternative stops the majority of the criticism, but only partially solves the problem.

I won’t be surprised if the Adobe Flash DRM features are turned on in the future, because the BBC has not yet issued a policy stating that it rejects DRM technologies and refuses to foist them on people.

However, assuming that DRM is going out and will stay out of the iPlayer, what are the next issues the BBC faces in engaging with the free culture movement?

Redistribution is a hard problem for the BBC to tackle. It would mean that, if I download an iPlayer show, I am permitted to share copies with my friends.

Probably they will also be British license fee payers, since I live in the UK and most of my friends are too. But what about my non-British, non-license fee paying friends?

Currently they can’t access at all many BBC works directly from the BBC – even many BBC web pages. It does this with “GeoIP”: looking up the IP address of each user in a database that lists the geographic location of all registered IP address blocks. For a long time the BBC has discriminated against non-UK-registered IP addresses. serving them different and less HTTP data than is accessible from a UK IP address.

This is merely access control, not DRM. DRM mandates proprietary software and is supported by laws that prohibit the distribution of free software that can access DRM media – a serious social problem.

A social problem… very interesting choice of words Dave. I agree were not out of the woods theres lots more to be done. GeoIP is shakey ground to be standing on but unless there is a global licence fee or something. We will end up in big trouble with the government, trust, worldwide and of course the rights holders. Its a complex issue and requires more thought and time that the DRM debate maybe?

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What just happened? Xbox 360 and PS3 did what?

Xbox 360 and Playstation side by side

So I heard rumours that the next Xbox 360 dsashboard upgrade would support Xvid and Divx but I didn't think it would be this soon? Everyone seems to say it works fine even with ac3 (dolby digital or dts audio), shame this is still not enough to make me switch. See xbox media centre is just too damm perfect and using the Xbox 360s blade system sucks in comparison. I mean I would need to unrar files before I could play them on the xbox 360, that just sucks. However the other interesting news is the break through on the PS3's graphics sub system (link is extremely hacking geeky, skip to bottom) (cheers JohnT) is something very special. Think about all the progress thats been done on xbmc already, add the fact the PS3 can already run linux without a problem, then throwing some real access to that cell processor and its heavy weight HD graphics subsystem and boy oh boy you have an amazing machine. Knowing Sony, I'm sure the next update of the virtualiser will lay another wall between Virtual machine and hardware.

If Sony knew what was good for them, they would let the hardware hackers do what there doing, even help them out! These guys are adding value you to your market failing console! Microsoft just released xvid/divx support and the wii is about to outstrip both ps3 and xbox 360 in the next 5 months in europe and japan. Sony needs something and let me tell you Home isn't it. Bear also in mind these hardware hackers are not bypassing the copy protection of the games or even hacking the sony master virtual image. So no intellectual property is being broken here. If running xbmc on it means another 10000+ people run out and buy a PS3. Thats a good thing…! Put another way, the xbox 1 still commands a reasonable price online because people are picking them up and running xbmc on them today. Go figure Sony., then send some hardware developers to help them.

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My worst fears about Playstation 3

Playstation 3

So my friend Lucas sent a link to what I had feared would be the case. Yes the Playstation 3 sucks as a media centre almost as bad as the Xbox 360. With only support for Mpeg2, Mpeg4 and h.264, it was always going to be pretty bad. But my plans to use Linux instead in the future when they port Xbox Media Cenre to linux.

So I get the box home, get Ubuntu 7.04 on there, open up Synaptic, and download VLC. I try some 1080i MPEG2 content from a USB external HFS+ formatted drive I have. These recordings are direct, uncompressed digital rips of DVB-C MPEG2 recorded from my Cable Box via Firewire. When the picture looks grainy and the framerate is about 10fps, I remember that the Linux kernel is running on top of a hypervisor that restricts access to certain parts of the hardware, namely the badass mother of a GPU. Without access to the graphics hardware (and without a custom kernel and apps designed for the additional six availiable SIMD cores), there is no hope of being able to decode a 1.5MB/s MPEG2 stream.

Nope the future looks to be XBMC on a slim/mini PC for me. Which reminds me, there was a good interview with some of the key developers behind XBMC project on boingboing a while ago.

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Ashley Highfield on iPlayer, DRM and Crossplatform Support

From the Backstage Blog, a frank discussion about DRM and Cross-platform support. It all started when I asked Ashley a few questions recently about the iplayer strategy. Ashley answered the question with quite a bit of passion and Matthew Cashmore thought hey wouldn't it be a good idea to get some of that passion in a recording. He is the result which you can judge for yourselves…

The iPlayer, no don't do a runner, seriously, it's taken over the mailing list, dominated our discussions and is something that many members of the backstage community care an awful lot about. So do we. We all know the questions. Why don't we stand up to the rights holders? Why do we insist on using DRM? Why did we sign a secret deal in blood with Microsoft?

So we finally decided that these questions needed answers, and the only person to talk to was the boss. We present 26 minutes of questions and answers about iPlayer, DRM and cross platform support with Ashley Highfield, Director Future Media & Technology.

In this frank discussion we cover the DRM issues, explain that iPlayer isn't a Microsoft only party and ask why didn't we use a non propriety solution.

You can get the file directly from Blip.TV under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike licence in Mpeg3, Ogg Vorbis or AAC.

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TV worth watching?

Dexter

So I've been downloading lots of media recently, believe it or not but me and my flatmate are eating through 168 gigabytes of data a month! Before you all point the finger at me, my flatmate is on skype everyday for long periods of the day. Anyway it means nothing because thankfully moving to Free software network means I'm only using half of my allocated bandwidth a month (yes I do pay 30 pounds a month for this connection, but rightly so). Anyway theres some great media to download.

If your not watching Dexter season 2 then what are you doing? Spooks season 7 (i think) on UK TV is certainly better that 24 ever was. Its worth noting Dragon's Den is also back and has a slightly new look. Back to American TV, and I can't help but watch Ugly Betty season 2 and Prison Break season 3

which seems to jump the shark every episode now. On the upside Heroes season 2 is simply amazing and can not be missed. While jumping back to the UK again for the last time Billie Piper in a Secret Diary Of A Call Girl is strangely non-sexy and more funny that anything else. Still worth a watch, but certainly cheap TV. Its a shame the real hustle just finished but I'm sure Hustle season 5 will start up again, soon. Although they will need to get back the female from Dexter first. There's certainly enough to watch till Lost comes back.

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Pay a voluntary contribution or suffer the shame?

The Real Hustle being filmed in Brighton

So I'm really late to the whole Radiohead price experiment. Many people have said how great it is, others have said there just copying what smaller artist have been doing for years on sites like Amiestreet, some of pondered interesting questions and others have moaned about the quality. But what I found interesting was Ben Metcalfe's post which asks the question Would you pay a voluntary contribution for your BitTorrent usage?

Having pushed for so long for digital distribution methods that afford us our full rights under copyright (ie no DRM), it’s kinda time that we step up to the plate and prove that today’s digital media consumers are not looking to freeload… or are we?)

I was just chatting about this issue with a heavy BitTorrent user I know well, who’ll remain anonymous. For her, she finds BitTorrent the most convenient way to select and consume media – she watches a lot of foreign TV and also occasionally enjoys watching video on her PSP (which doesn’t support any DRM-for-video technology even if the content she wants to watch is available in a DRM’d format). Downloading torrent files from sites across the world and transcoding them into a PSP-friendly format has become a simple and painless process which she finds quicker and more convenient for her needs than any DRM system out there right now.

She is frustrated that she has to use what are currently deemed ‘illegal methods’ to obtain the media and can’t do anything to legitimize the content she is viewing.

So I know Chris Anderson is writing a new book called Free but honestly if I could pay the artist or production company for my DRM free download I would. Depending on the content I would pay between 1p – 2 pounds. 2 pounds for heroes, dexter, Dr Who, IT crowd, etc. 1 pounds for Ugly Betty, Apprentice, The Real Hustle, etc. 30p for Prison Break, Daily show, etc. I would also pay for podcasters and videocasters for their efforts if it was conveient and simple.

There was something interesting I heard at the wealth of networks conference in Boston. The Social Facebook application, called Causes. So the thinking behind the causes application is that the person can indicate what causes they support. But that application also tells people if you've donated money or helped that cause recruit new members. The idea being that if your friends have all donated loads of money over months, and you nothing. You would be shamed into taking the cause off your list. Now if you imagine something like this for TV, Music and even Film I guess? (I know Tioti is thinking about badges to indicate you like a certain show) you could have some site like last.fm or tioti/sharetv which tracks your tv/music but also shows when you donated money or helped out in someway. I guess the people who just want stuff for free will not sign up, but for the rest of us this is a way of showing your really a fan and enjoyed the show so much you paid or did something in return. This would also show the producers how popular there show/tune is and you could build grassroot graphs and charts I guess. If the real hustle series 1 rakes in a load of money and series 2 double that, you know your doing something right. If its less and less then its time to change something or give up. Its like voting for a show but the financial decision means votes are not given in vain or lightly. Hey and its helping out the people who work really hard. Just a idea, not really formed yet.

I'm not really a fan of Radiohead, but if this helps the content producers and owners into considering other business/revenue models, then put me down for 5 pounds…

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I’m just glad someone still working on the Xbox 360

A long time ago, a hack was found so you can play copied games and backups on a Xbox 360. So the hacking went dead except for a little blip here and there. Well now it turns out that people have already got Linux on it and have been working on running unsigned code on it. Maybe I wrote the platform off too soon?

From Xbox-scene.com,

Since we have an exploit in the hypervisor (kernel 4532 and 4548) and recently found a way to downgrade to these kernels, some hackers over at the XBH forums are working on a way to boot homebrew code on the Xbox360. Linux was already done via the linux bootloader, but for homebrew we'll need another bootloader obviously that will allow to boot 'unsigned' xbox 360 code.

If this works, then I wonder if someone will convert xbox media centre over to that platform too? Imagine Linux, PC, Xbox, Xbox 360 and PS3 all being choices for XBMC.

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Windows Home Server add-ons in the near future?

Window home server

So I'm still having problems getting my XP laptop to back up to the home server but while looking around I found a load of ideas for what could be added to Windows Home Server to improve its experience even further. I got a few of my own but heres a few I found while looking around.

  1. Memory Stick Backups – A service that will run on my desktop or laptop and automatically back up my USB memory stick whenever I plug it in.  Each memory stick should be backed up to the same location on the server no matter which computer I plug it in to.
  2. Download Manager – Automatically hand off regular downloads from Internet Explorer to be downloaded and stored on my home server.
  3. User Account Sync – Automatically create user accounts on client PCs for each Windows Home Server user account.  Automatically update passwords.
  4. Favorites Sync – Sync my favorites to a folder on WHS. (I know I can do this with foldershare.  Add-in would be much better.)  Also include Desktop Sync, My Documents Sync, etc.
  1. Activesync backups – How cool would it be if Activesync backups were also included in backups but as another machine.
  2. Bit Torrent client/server with TVRSS – Someones got add this one day soon, I mean imagine utorrent or azureus which both can be run headless or from the web, inside of home server. Also imagine being able to make any file or folder a torrent to share with friends and family.
  3. Podcast client – Same as the bit torrent one really but just RSS.
  4. Notifications – I would like to see notifications via email, im and other means.
  5. VPN – VPN tunnel between two or more home servers, so you can maybe sync up with off-site backup or a friends server.
  6. Rar support – Yes I could install Winrar but I don't want to and its about time windows generally supported rar like it supports zip.
  7. Webdav – Ideally it all shares would have the option of being a webdav share too. People are hacking this already using IIS.
  8. DAAP – Someones got to hack this into the home server at some point. I've already noticed people asking for itunes support on the windows home server forum.
  9. XBSP – No where near essential but support for the xbox media centre streaming protocal would be nice too.
  10. Zeroconf – Yes universal plug and play is ok but we need some zeroconf/bonjour/mdns to hook up to things like mac products and some of the devices you can now get.

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New developments in the field of TV sharing

So recently I've written off Tioti (Tape if off the internet.com) in favour of the up and coming sharetv.org. Well after a chat with the creator of Tioti Paul, it seems there was lots going on in the background which were just not public. But before that, shareTV hasn't been sitting still either.

ShareTV has ramped up its social networking as suggested in a previous blog entry. Now you can edit your profile (which has got to be the first step in social networking), you can edit your name, add some details about yourself and add a avatar using yahoo avatars. I was wondering if sharetv would also suck or link to your yahoo profile but it doesn't seem like anything clever, yet!. There's also a couple of option titled check boxes.

  • email me when someone adds me as a friend
  • allow others users to contact me through email

The ShareTV blog came clean the other day with the title TV Social Network. In which he talks about all the elements described before.

I've been working a lot recently on making the site more of a social network for tv fans as this is something many have been asking for. New Features:

  • you can now add friends to your profile
  • you can edit your profile (avatar, about me, etc.)
  • your avatar is used where ever you leave a comment including the forum
  • you can now leave comments on other members page
  • updated the points table
  • you can see the top members
  • almost finished with allowing users to vote on and add their favorite characters to their profile

Coming Soon:

  • live chatrooms
  • show reviews
  • fun tv facts
  • tv news

if anyone has any more ideas, let me know.

I've got some ideas but theres some good thoughts on the official ShareTV To-Do list. I would like to see a API, Microformats, Javascript badges which can be placed elsewhere. How about some facebook compatibility? APML export? So you can share your TV preferences. Anyway I'm full of ideas and its great the author has now made him self public.

Tape of the internet has certainly changed since I last looked at it. Paul invited me to a sneak preview of the newest version and I'm actually impressed. Everything is cleaner and more manageabe. I'm hoping to have a bigger play over the coming weeks. There is something major which Tioti has done which I can't say right now but I'm dying to try it out and see how well it works.

Both this web applications are coming at the TV pie from different directions but are starting to meet in the middle. The maturity of TV sharing is finally going somewhere.

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Xbox Media Centre is being ported to Linux

At long last a answer to my question, from the Linux port project,

 Currently, a few developers on Team-XBMC have begun the porting of XBMC to Linux (and OpenGL using the SDL toolkit). The goal is for this to become a full port of XBMC with all the features and functions that are available on the Xbox version of XBMC with the exception of Xbox exclusive functionality as Trainers, launching Xbox Games, and such). This is a huge task which is why we are now making this public request, seeking C/C++ programmers to volunteer in assisting us with this Linux porting development project. Whether you have contributed to The XBMC Project in the past or not, please consider doing so now.

Note to XBMC end-users! Please understand that this Linux port project is not yet mature enough for you as an end-user to play with. We can not yet give you an ETA as to when it will be useful for end-users. Respect that we can not accept any bug-reports or feature/function-requests for this Linux port yet. If you as end-users have any questions or need to get something off your chest about this then please direct that towards the existing XBMC Linux port end-user discussion topic-thread in our community-forum.

Yes as you can all see Xbox Media Centre is being ported to the GNU/Linux operating system. This is great news because it will be able to play on those nice little shuttle PCs you can buy, give MythTV a real kick up the ass in regards to user-friendly-ness and maybe be possible to run on exotic hardware like the Playstation 3? Every day I can't imagine watching media without XBMC. I helped a friend of mine get his xbox working with the latest version of xbmc this weekend. It was amazing to see the old Xbox media player of many years ago. Things really have progressed forward very quickly, I'm sure we'll be laughing at xbmc 2.1 when 4.0 version comes to town.

Its a real shame whats up with the xbox media centre isn't up to date because theres a load of changes in the later beta builds (its weird to think its even a beta really). I installed one of the July betas and have been impressed by the general speed of the interface. It also copes 720p Xvid with AC3 in my copy of Sin City.

meta-technorati-tags=XBMC, xbmc, linux, xbox

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