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Within a day it was streaming to VLC…

Iplayer content in Mpeg4 streams

To Clairfy, this is my view not those of my employer. I am not suggesting that breaking BBC DRM or systems is good. But in this endless war on DRM I have blogged whats going on.

I'm wondering how long it will take for BBC iplayer content destined for the iPhone, to appear on peoples desktops. And I'm now wondering about the Xbox Media Centre, The Wii, The PSP, etc? My guess, because of the weekend 2-4 days. All the details are here… This is another example of how hyper clever and passionate the backstage community really are. I just wish it didn't involve downloading the file (Seems there might have been a problem with the servers?). Lets get it streaming and make them into legal services (aka don't break, GeoIP or Streaming) which I can promote to the managers as positive examples of opening content.

The BBC have just launched a version of their iPlayer that works with the iPhone (and iPod Touch). Instead of streaming Flash, it streams an MP4… but they don't let non-iPhone users know it's an option. So, I used the User Agent Switcher to set Firefox to claim to be an iPhone, and in place of the normal Flash playback doofer, I got a Quicktime one instead… and nothing much happened. It turns out it's because it won't actually stream, it wants to download the whole thing. That's no problem though, I get 600kb/sec downloads at work =)

So, I got out Firebug and found the stream; then copied and pasted it into the address bar, and it started downloading to play in Firefox again. Not what I wanted – so I went to Save Page As… and saved the MP4 file. And then realised that I was actually, at this point, trying to download it three times (the original iPlayer window, the new QuickTime-only tab and the download) so I closed everything else, and watched it download the mp4 at the aforementioned 600kb/sec.

Once finished, I knew it had worked – hovering the pointer over the file in Windows Explorer showed its dimensions (480×272), and moments later an entirely randomly chosen programme was playing in VLC.

So, who fancies cobbling together some code to automate this, to do what the BBC has failed to do all along – make a reasonable quality iPlayer download service for platforms other than Windows, which lacks DRM? 

So its now Monday morning and the Backstage list has been on fire over the weekend. Not only is there a fully usable Xbox Media Centre script which allows you to watch iplayer content but Matthew's been busy and updated his iplayer related prototypes. Finally also there is a very clear guide to getting it working using any Gnu/linux system. Since the Mpeg4 streams/downloads went live, people on the list have been asking why it doesn't stream correctly? People like Andy Halsall
are asking how this all fits in with the DRM versions which have launched on Windows and is coming to the Mac? Also can they really use these streams?

So if the BBC are entitled to distribute this material DRM free for the
iPhone, why are they not providing it for other platforms? I'm sure
Mac/Linux/Windows/$other users would quite like DRM free, non-expiring media.

In addition, I have to wonder about the legality of ripping the BBC's iPlayer
streams in the manner described in Matt's how-to, it works, and works well
(or at least it did at around 18:00 today), the end result would be ideal for
many people in a variety of circumstances.

Then the whole thing got boingboinged…

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Home server campaign

Mommy, why is there a Server in the house

I only saw this today when Nicole sent me a link. Believe it or not, you can actually buy this book on Amazon and this User comment made ginger beer come out my nose, although its a tad unfair to slag off the kids.

This is the crap that Balmer reads to his deprived kids. This is really sick. If I gave my wife a home server she would divorce me. If this really came from Microsoft, I lost all respect for them. I would say the same thing if it came from Apple or Linux.
But it is kinda funny in a Britney Spears train wreck sort of way.

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Wii Bowling Highscore

Wii Bowling highscore of 249

Wii Sports don't you just love it? Its one of the only games I play regularlly but I managed the other day to score 249 which included 7 strikes. This took some effort and you'll be glad to hear I was sweating enough to open the patio doors. Ok yes its not quite the work out you'd get on a treadmill, but who would blog their achivements on a treadmill? I'm not that far behind other either. 257, 244, 278 279 (almost perfect), 300 (Wow! perfect). Ahhh damm you Kapowaz you are not allowed to come to the wii geekdinner ever.

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Rez HD, I wish. But what’s Boogie?

Rez HD

I missed Rez the first time round because I never owned a PS2 or Dreamcast, and it looks like I may miss out again because Rez HD is only on Xbox 360 only. Don't get me wrong I've played Rez but only at 5min blasts at a gaming festival, I've never got a chance to really get involved like the time I've sunk into the Wipeout or Burnout. Anyway here's a great review which makes me wish I had a Xbox 360 for the first time ever.

So after looking at videos for Rez HD, I decided to look for videos of Bust A Move (bust a groove in the UK) and Bust a Move 2. Both I own but number 2 doesn't work because I own a PAL machine and the game is JP NTSC, so all the tunes are out of time in the 50-60hz switch over. Anyway, I couldn't find any updates to it except Dance dance revolution which I'm sorry isn't the same! But then I found Boogie. Honestly I've never seen this before but it looks like Bust a Move evolved. However it got a crap score. So I might rent it and see if I like it. If not Dance dance revolution Wii Party looks like my only fix for the dance games on next generation consoles.

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Beyond HD: 4k projection

Sunflower projected at 4k

A couple of my friends and family are very much into their True HD (1080p) content and displays. I'm not that bothered because, lets be honest I'm unlikely to buy a HD-DVD or Blu-Ray player, my primary media player (xbmc) doesn't play back HD without dropping frames (nice looking frames that they are) and I'm honestly happy with 720p from the distance I would sit. Anyway, like always there is always something better that what you can buy. So feast your eyes on 4k projection (4mpx image every frame) Tony, Che, Lucas, Nico, etc…

Two 2k projectors side by side

3712 x 1080 @ 50fps progressive. Yes stitch two 2K projectors together, give them half the image and then using machine logic display them exactly side by side. Thats what our research and innovation team have done to create a panoramic picture with the density and richness only ever seen in DLP cinemas. The pictures I shot don't do it any kind of justice, but if you thought that was amazing. Just remember the sunflowers were shot with a 8k NHK super HiVision camera and scaled & cropped for this lower quality version. So if you want to be top dog, you'd better save up your money for one of these badboys and setup Super-HiVision-bits.org because HD-bits.org isn't going to cut it.

Rugby game on a 4k projector

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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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