On 09/03/2008, Ivan Pope <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I'm interested in why this is for the iPhone and not for other phones, e.g. > my N95.
The next question is when can someone get this running on a Android Simulator? (Or even one of the hardware devices?). According to the online docs[1] Android supports MPEG4. And while we are at it what about download to Android, after all it looks like DRM may be included (or at least there is a package in the package index[2] called android.drm, it is however blank[3]). If you understand how Android works then it doesn't look like it should be too hard, the examples look quite straight forward[4]. Unfortunately I don't know enough about Android to give it a shot. You would need to fetch the appropriate pages from the web and parse them if you want to use the non-BBC iPlayer page layout, but it looks more possible now than it did. Now if only we could get the BBC Radio streams in MP3 (or something else that's useable)? It is possible to capture and transcode the .ra feeds but there will be legal issues with relaying it to a mobile device (if copyright is supposed to protect innovation, why is it making it a damn site harder?). Of course if the BBC had it in a nicer format to start with it wouldn't be a problem. And it wouldn't cost them a lot to do, mplayer[5] to decode to WAVE, lame[6] to encode to MP3, both Free! (or just mencoder[7]) Anyone at BBC R&D thinking about an Android App that let's you access iPlayer and BBC Radio on the move, in a more "mobile friendly" interface than all the HTML and Javascript? Maybe add something to fetch BBC podcasts? (Assuming Android devices will have adequate storage for such an endeavour). > What I mean is, what thing have they done to make it unique for the > iPhone and what can we do to route around that so other phones can use it? What they have done is called "user agent sniffing". They basically look at whats connecting and if its an iPhone they serve a different web page. You can spoof user agent[8][9] to bypass this but thats not a proper solution. All that is needed is link to the mobile version for when the user agent sniffing fails. It shouldn't take more than 10 minutes to do that (but it has to be done at the BBC end). That being said Kudos to the BBC for actually using MPEG4! Andy [1] http://code.google.com/android/what-is-android.html [2] http://code.google.com/android/reference/packages.html [3] http://code.google.com/android/reference/android/drm/package-summary.html [4] http://code.google.com/android/toolbox/apis/media.html [5] http://www8.mplayerhq.hu/design7/news.html [6] http://lame.sourceforge.net/index.php [7] http://www.mplayerhq.hu/DOCS/HTML/en/mencoder.html [8] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_agent#User_agent_spoofing [9] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/59 -- Computers are like air conditioners. Both stop working, if you open windows. -- Adam Heath - 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]/
