
BBC iPlayer begins to trial HTML5 player - jayflux
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/internet/entries/19d875b8-c966-465b-880a-e38c71900c4c
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porsupah
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"

~~~
arm
Whoa, I’m pretty surprised. I thought Omni abandoned OmniWeb quite a long time
ago, but it seems to still be getting updates!

[http://omnistaging.omnigroup.com/omniweb/](http://omnistaging.omnigroup.com/omniweb/)

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unfamiliar
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.

~~~
IshKebab
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).

In some ways this is a step back from Flash.

~~~
jzwinck
I wonder why they feel the need to encrypt public television. Is it so spies
cannot find out what you're watching?

~~~
johneth
Usually rights reasons.

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.

~~~
click170
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.

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bhauer
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.

~~~
gdrulia
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.

[0] - [http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer](http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer)

~~~
tombrossman
That button isn't displayed if you are outside the UK, which causes some
confusion. I guess it's a simpler solution than redirecting to an error page.

~~~
qqg3
Which makes sense, because you're not supposed to be using iPlayer outside the
UK.

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Already__Taken
> 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.

This is just about EME extensions is it not?

~~~
TD-Linux
Yes. It sounds like they are not using EME, which is great! It means that
it'll be much easier to support on all browsers in the future.

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cognivore
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?

~~~
tombrossman
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.

Edit: formatting

~~~
PuffinBlue
If you're using Linux or are getting the media from Youtube you might be
interested in a tool to get the video from the BBC directly:

get_iplayer - [https://squarepenguin.co.uk](https://squarepenguin.co.uk)

~~~
tombrossman
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/](https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/)

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andreineculau
Meanwhile at ITV...
[https://itvplayer.uservoice.com/forums/247805-general/sugges...](https://itvplayer.uservoice.com/forums/247805-general/suggestions/8759230-html5-support-
would-increase-target-audience-and-s)

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ris
Just waiting for them to do it for radio too now. Haven't been able to listen
to missed radio shows since the big radio/iplayer shakeup.

~~~
mdaniel
I believe you'll find the shows here, and in other "radio aggregator" sites:

[http://tunein.com/radio/BBC-Radio-1-988-s24939/](http://tunein.com/radio/BBC-
Radio-1-988-s24939/)

I've heard from a guy who knows a guy that it's super easy to time-shift those
streams into a local file, too.

~~~
ris
Excellent, thank you!

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JupiterMoon
So goodbye to BBC iplayer on Linux soon then? That day I will stop paying my
licence fee (perfectly legally as I don't view live TV anyway).

~~~
MacsHeadroom
More like goodbye vulnerable and out of date Flash Player on Linux.

The HTML5 iplayer works (better) in Firefox on Linux already.

~~~
wjoe
It doesn't work for me with Firefox on Linux, and they state it's not
supported (yet?). What version are you running?

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BillinghamJ
Not available for Safari on desktop at the moment :\

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keeperofdakeys
I think it's interesting to note that they don't even bother listing the
required version for google chrome [http://blog.codinghorror.com/the-infinite-
version/](http://blog.codinghorror.com/the-infinite-version/)

~~~
mdaniel
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?).

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logn
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.

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SeanLuke
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".

~~~
unfamiliar
>trial is not a verb, except as a very recent (post 1990) colloquialism

Are we not in post-1990?

~~~
SeanLuke
Colloquialisms are not standard vocabulary. But more to the point, this isn't
the original headline: because the BBC has editors.

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yarrel
The BBC pushing DRM again.

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.

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Paul_S
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?

~~~
JamesBaxter
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.

~~~
Paul_S
They don't have to, but they want to. They could say they will not accept
content that requires DRM, just like GOG does.

BBC is state funded so it should be easier for it (easier than for a for
profit company like GOG) to not be evil.

~~~
jamespo
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.

~~~
rikkus
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.

~~~
JupiterMoon
Because if they did it would contribute the the view that they are not much
more than yet another commercial TV station...

