On 07/03/2008, [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Quoting Dave Crossland <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > > > It is bizarre that the BBC won't negotiate with 3rd party rights > > holders to secure non-DRM internet distribution. > > I doubt that the BBC "won't". It is possible to negotiate such a deal > (see "Where Are The Joneses"). But 3rd party rightsholders usually > think that it is not in their interests to do so, and so they don't.
Well, it turns out that in fact they just have :-) http://www.flickr.com/photos/twindx/2316284105/ says: "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 (480x272), 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?" -- Regards, Dave - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. Unofficial list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/
