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ABC Launches Full Episode Streaming
Cjattwood writes "ABC.com has launched their free online episode streaming service earlier today. Shows available include Lost and Alias among others, and are available to watch for free, albeit with ads and commercials. It works pretty well so far, although no Linux support yet as it requires Flash 8." The first episode of Lost on there is a clip show. You can skip around to a segment of the show, but are forced through a commercial before you play. The quality is approximately what you would expect from flash video.
Only US viewers are allowed to watch... tsk tsk tsk.
Only IPs from the United States can watch these movies. I actually pay for ABC on my TV, and I can't watch these. Doesn't anyone think of the canucks???? :P
You create your own reality - Leave mine to me.
... you can get around that with proxies according to Digg (also here). This project is only up for at least a two-month trial period. Full screen is not possible, but there are two different sizes and the quality is excellent (not HDTV quality) on a fast Internet connection at my workplace.
Don't forget to leave feedbacks for ABC on this project! Let them know what you think of it! It is also missing two of my other TV shows (Invasion and Grey's Anatomy). So, I left a request and a positive comment for ABC via its feedback.
I wonder if there is a way to set the Flash video to fullscreen onto my TV as a video overlay? I do this with Windows' Media Players, VideoLAN Client Media Player, DVD players, etc. I don't have to set the players to fullscreen, just the video out.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
See this Macromedia forum post from Digg story. Unfortunately, it is after Windows and Mac OS X releases. :(
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I'm sure you can find a torrent link to get them in HD without the commercials.
The submitted text:
"it requires Flash 8"
Cmdr Taco's value-add comment:
"The quality is approximately what you would expect from flash video."
It's actually exactly what you'd expect from Flash video, because it is Flash video. That being said, what quality would you expect? I bet it differs quite a bit based on the datarate you encode it at... Perhaps he's saying it's similar in quality to YouTube or Google Video? (We only give you a hard time because we imagine that you have one of the best jobs in the world, so don't take it personally, Taco.)
For people asking about Linux versions of Flash 8 - they've had a separate team working on Flash 9 for quite a while and it's set to be released later this year (it includes significant changes for performance improvement, was in development to some extent in parallel with Flash 8) - and from what I understand as a casual obsverver they're going to release a Flash 9 player for Linux and just skip 8 entirely. This is in part because it's only relativly recently that they've added dedicated Linux staff, and in part beacuse this is the fastest switch between versions (8 to 9) that I can recall, anyway.
The hope is that Linux release will be simultaneous with the Mac/Windows launch, but I don't know if anyone's commited to that yet - or if it's just idle hope.
... then watch Alias. Marshall rocks as a computer/technical geek and is funny. :) He even uses Linux, KDE, XMMS, and xmame in the show as shown here and here (screen captures!). ;)
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
You can get a full-length movie at DVD resolution on a single CD using DivX5 with very ilttle loss of quality as compared to a DVD. If you had four minutes at that res taking up more than a CD's worth, it was probably compressed with HuffYUV at best, and may have been full-frame uncompressed video.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
You can use a United States proxy from http://www.proxy4free.com/page1.html. (Example Firefox: Tools -> Options -> Conection Settings-> Manual Proxy Config. -> HTTP: 216.12.200.106 Port: 3128) I'm from Spain and I had tested with Lost (just episode 220 available) and Alias (Episodes 501-512) with no problems
From what I understand (inside source), Limelight Networks (www.llnw.net) is carrying this. When starting a stream, one or more connections were created to IP's on their network. It seems they're in the CDN (content delivery network) business.
> How the hell do they manage it?
http://www.limelightnetworks.com/
"The quality is approximately what you would expect from flash video."
That's actually very misleading. Flash 8 includes a new codec which is considered among the best for online video streaming (and video in general): On2's VP6. It's a fully featured decoder also with deringing, deblocking and so on filters that enhance the quality of the decoded image.
If the quality is crappy it was a deliberate choice of ABC to keep the bitrate low for whatever reasons, or using bad encoders (which I doubt, but how can I know).
If there's one thing, Flash doesn't have a native full screen mode, which for a streaming TV show is kinda a bummer...
If you look around, there's quite a few sites that allow you to save videos from YouTube etc.
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
I can't imagine they will be very happy with ABC direct-releasing similarly-poor-quality videos for free. I smell another frivolous lawsuit...
Well, that'd be an interesting lawsuit, since Apple's CEO is on the board of ABC's parent company now.
Sam! If you will let me be,
I will try them.
You will see.
Flash uses a version of the On vp2 codec to the best of my knowledge.
/ a/2006/04/30/MNGJGII7BB1.DTL&o=0
Other codecs can produce better if not as good quality at the same file sizes.
Sorenson, (I'm not kidding)
3ivx for creating platform independent MP4
Apple's H.264
And MPEG1 - for the size that the Flash movies were encoded
Some of the above codecs are also VBR where you set your desired quality level and each frame is only as big as it needs to be. But alas, Flash is on most browsers. What I haven't seen are DVD sized flash videos or any of larger dimensons.
FYI, I'm on a Quad mac and the video immediately starts chugging when the browser window is in the background. I'd rather look at a streaming Quicktime like the one here:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/object/article?f=/c
The quality is better, and it even streams fine on my upgraded dual g4 cube.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
You've got 17-18 minutes of commercials to fill up in an hour of television.
:30 after the bumper. Programs like American Idol can have 20+ minutes of commercials.
For hour long network shows, the commercial segments are 3:30 on the quarter hours and 4:30 on the half hour nowadays. You also get a 3:30 after the bumper. Pad all of those with 5-seconds of "Stay tuned for news at 9!" The remaining ~3:00 minutes gets you previews, network notifications (Stay tuned for a new Episode of FOOBAR!) and between-show commercials.
A few shows have some liberties with this. The Sheild, which in first run, has only
Additionally, you are assuming that people would all watch at discreet intervals without overlapping too much and that nobody else would be using the Internet for any other purpose. In reality, there will already be a high traffic load and people will want the video in clumps. It is why people like Apple are offering downloadable video and not streaming. That way if it takes 2 hours to download a 1 hour show, at least you didn't have to sit through all of the pauses
Finally, a 45 minute show off of iTunes currently runs about 200MB at about 670Kbps. That 10Gb pipe would max out at far fewer than 20,000 streams.
Actually it works like a dream on the Mac. That's what makes this thing better than most of the other video players -- no reliance on Windows media
It's easy. 1) install Wine 2) install Windows 32 Firefox via Wine 3) install Flash 8 and Java plugins via Win32 Firefox. Hell, install Shockwave while you're at it, too. Watch the ABC Stream. If you're outside the U.S., simply go through a U.S. Proxy (see other posts on this thread or do a quick Google search). So, Linux users outside the U.S., like me, can access these streams. Enjoy! Quash
The codec is Flash video. It's Macromedia's/Adobe's own codec.
No.. the codec used in FLV is one of two types:
If it's flash6, it's H.263
If it's flash8, it's On2's VP6.
FLV is just a wrapper.. like Quicktime.
I don't see why you need Flash 8, or flash at all. Just find the link to the .flv file and watch it in MPlayer.
Is there something I'm missing here?