You realise that Open Source isn't an organisation that designs software,
right? You also realise we've had SWF verification software for quite a long
time and we're happily using it to download video behind SWF verified flash
apps?
The Open Source Community should come up with a solution then...The fact that
we already have SWF verification is besides the point; it's just another
technical DRM measure.The point is the view is that Open Source software isn't
considered bothering about by the BBC because too few people use it and there's
the fear of "piracy". (in spite of the fact that downloads from VoD aren't used
by pirates because of the poor quality compared to broadcasts)
The cat and mouse game stops when players like mythtv and the likes are
accepted as mainstream. If this means disallowing recordings or respecting time
restrictions then so be it. As soon as you can show that the existence of the
software for 99.999% of users is not for piracy you've called the BBCs bluff.
It will also lower the proportion of people downloading the files from p2p
networks just like iPlayer itself did when it was launched.
I really don't think user experience is the issue. My user experience with
iPlayer is that I get home and all my favourite TV shows have magically been
downloaded and are visible in Boxee, watchable in HD at a time when my ISP is
normally dealing with a mass of traffic. get_iplayer has a pretty big user base
without a shiny UI because most people want software to do what they want first
and then have it looking cool doing it later.
Most people aren't going to mess about with a command line app to do this. User
experience is very important. It's why ITV Player and Channel 4 Player haven't
done as well. Quite often the services don't work or it's unclear whether the
programmes you want to watch are available. Even more so when ITV used
Silverlight. For Open Source video playback software to be recognised it has to
provide a comparable or better user experience. There is plenty of scope for
innovation too for example low cost ARM-based playback devices with a full
10-foot UI.
get_iplayer was better than BBC's effort because it enabled HD playback on
Linux, which was not something they'd managed before.
This was possible (albeit a bit poorly) with Flash on Linux.
In my opinion open source could develop a Canvas alternative by itself that
could outclass whatever's being developed behind closed doors. Plex is probably
the closest to this goal in my opinion.
It's also worth mentioning that the Samsung TVs which have iPlayer built into
them use ffmpeg to demux the streams. I doubt Samsung TVs will be unable to
access iPlayer soon though...
