Chris Howell said at December 12th, 2007 at 11:52pm

I love the way the volume goes all the way to 11
and the face that it works perfectly on my iMac.
brilliant.

Joff said at December 13th, 2007 at 8:40am

That’s good news - I can watch Spooks in my statutory lunch break, yay.

I’ll still use the horrible Kontiki thing, though, since I like to watch things on my telly. The quality of the Flash-based content is quite a bit lower, for obvious reasons I suppose.

William T said at December 13th, 2007 at 1:25pm

Wow that’s fantastic… I second the ‘I might actually use it now’ comment. Just think of all the bad publicity that could have been avoided had the elegant streaming bit been built first and the fiddly downloads added afterwards…

Incidentally I like the little visual clues that are being added to the Radio Player these days (e.g. the “Why has this changed?” and, (I paraphrase) “Why is everything broken?” from the database problems a month or two back. Shows the BBC can be open about iterative development.)

As an aside, I suspect the beeb are perhaps the only organisation keeping Realplayer afloat nowadays - I had some dealings with them in the past and most of the people who were there seem to have jumped ship to Google etc. And, despite the fact that Realplayer was quite fun to develop for, I’m finding the Windows Media plugin decidedly quicker and more reliable to use. With the move to streaming, I wonder if Real will still exist as a company in a few years time?

Understanding » Blog Archive » BBC iPlayer is now DRM Free! said at December 13th, 2007 at 2:03pm

[...] yet work with Gnash at all, although I hope that will change shortly. The most excellent James Cridland has a screenshot of it running with the proprietary Adobe Flash player, making it all the more [...]

sine nomine said at December 13th, 2007 at 8:14pm

Do you need a television licence to watch?

Ted Swart said at December 14th, 2007 at 11:31pm

Wow! Looks as if sensible and relentless critique actually works sometimes. What a singular victory.

David Gerard said at December 15th, 2007 at 12:37pm

To get it working with Gnash, get a copy of the Flash source to the Gnash developers so they know exactly what they need to get working in Gnash to make it work. They may suggest you use function X instead of function Y or whatever, but it’ll be the best way to make it work on the full beardy free software stack.

Mark said at December 15th, 2007 at 2:55pm

I am (was) also using iPlayer on Ubuntu Linux. Unfortunately I did the upgrade to Flashplayer 9.0.115.0 in order to get fullscreen and now it just crashes Firefox when I click on play - interestingly the problem doesn’t occur with Youtube.

Not sure whether you picked up on an announcement a few weeks back that BBC, ITV and C4 are working together to provide a standard player for all their services. I assume this will be be based on the BBC version (i.e. Flash) and, once completed, I believe it will be one of the biggest changes to the way we look at TV in the UK. Imagine having a simple cheap set top box (similar to the one BT are using) using Linux based OS with the ability to watch and record terrestrial digital TV as well as being able to watch free and paid-for streamed “on-demand” programming from all 3 of the major UK programme providers via broadband. It wouldn’t be long before other content providers started to make their stuff available direct to customers same way and the current middlemen (Sky and Virgin Media) will fade into insignificance.

Stephen said at March 20th, 2008 at 4:33pm

Hi,
A friend of mine worked on the iPlayer and is responsible for the volume going to 11 - a knowing nod to spinal tap!