Adam wrote:
Nokia have released the Nokia N900 phone based on their Maemo operating
system.
As it doesn't support S60 WRT that the current Nokia phones iPlayer app
is written in is there anyway i can access the iPlayer videos directly.
I can access the current videos and play them, but they are unwatchable
as the phone can't handle them. This might be due to the standard
streams using the VP6 codec, although i haven't been able to confirm this.
The specs are:
* Firefox Mobile browser
* Flash 9.4
* Maemo OS based on Debian with ARM processor
* User Agent "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux armv7l; en-GB; rv:1.9.2a1pre)
Gecko/20090928 Firefox/3.5 Maemo Browser 1.4.1.21 RX-51 N900"
Is there a work around to get iPlayer working on this phone and videos
watchable?
I've had a n900 for about a month now and I've been thinking about this
quite a lot recently.
The device is quite capable of playing h.264 at iplayer quality. I've
been able to get it to play some HD stuff, and I'll try some iplayer
quality stuff at some point. The hardware is certainly able to render
good quality ogg+vorbis+theora/mpeg4+h264+aac fine.
Watching flash iplayer with the device fundamentally works - the
controls work - you can do full screen etc. However you only get one
frame every two seconds due to flash being exceedingly heavy on the
processor as opposed to native gstreamer video stuff.
I don't really think it's the VP6 codec *per se* being the issue, but
more the VP6 *flash player* bit.
Unfortunately, I've been really busy lately but I keep meaning to knock
together an iPlayer viewer with get_iplayer for the N900, perhaps by
modifying one of the Maemo h264 youtube video viewers. The N900 was born
for this sort of media consumption and it seems a shame that it is being
prevented from doing it.
I find it mildly ironic how back in the old days of "the iPlayer
flamewars", it was suggested initially that GNU/Linux was pretty much
irrelevant and then subsequently that the Adobe stack would solve the
cross platform compatibility issue.
With a growing number of smartphone operating systems running GNU/Linux
in some form (Android, Maemo, LiMo, WebOS etc.) and the number of
smartphones not supporting flash (iPhoneOS), or not having the power to
play anything in flash more intensive than Youtube eg. iPlayer (Every
mobile OS that supports Adobe Flash?), I'm not sure that GNU/Linux is
largely irrelevant or that Adobe is the answer.
Hopefully the next iteration will take a common sense approach because
the iPlayer concept really rocks. :)
Have a great new year!
Tim
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