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BBC's Open Player Claims Not Followed Through
ruphus13 writes "BBC's iPlayer was originally built on Microsoft's DRM-protected technology, and has never really been liked by folks like the FSF. The BBC is trying to play nice, though, recently claiming, 'the BBC has always been a strong advocate and driver of open industry standards. Without these standards, TV and radio broadcasting would simply not function. I believe that the time has come for the BBC to start adopting open standards such as H.264 and AAC for our audio and video services on the web.' This article argues that actions speak louder than words, and this is where the BBC falls short. 'The fact that both AAC and H.264 are encumbered with patent licenses that make their distribution under free licenses problematic flies in the face of this definition. It's good to see a major organization like the BBC switching from closely held secretive codecs to more widespread and documented ones. But it would be even better to see them throw their considerable weight behind some truly open formats.'"
h.264 patent licencing applies to devices (and even that is low cost):
http://www.dspr.com/www/technology/technology.htm#H.264 Licensing Fees
Which is developed by BBC, a cutting edge video standard on the level with H.264 and is free as in speech? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirac_(codec)
Wasn't it supposed to be used in Beijing Olympics?
The Ogg/Vorbis format is often touted as completely free and unencumbered by patents, but is it? Is Dirac?
Have any free formats ever been taken to court and won, proving their status as truly free? Or are they 'under the radar' at the moment, not worth testing in court because they've not reached critical mass yet?
I ask because I actually don't know. I'd like to see truly free formats, but I'm not sure if they are, or if people just think they are.
Sorry to post as AC but I've lost a domain and can't get my password back (yet).
The Beeb have been toying with this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirac_(codec) (many links on page) since 2004. The biggest problem it has is a lack of optimisation now slowly being solved. It is supposed to be patent un-encumbered, open source and about as "free" as software from a large, commercial organisation is likely to get.
If they were _serious_ about this maybe they should take on some C/asm coders under contract (nudge nudge) to further optimise and, very importantly, app developers to build content tools, conversion utilities and a web browser based plugin.
For web apps this should be no more inconvenient than downloading, say, Flash, Silverlight or Quicktime (stop complaining at the back)
The next problem is content. The BBC has tonnes of it. I suspect corporate inertia is behind the lack of adoption (it frequently is). Someone start kicking some arse at the Beeb please.
http://www.burnttoys.net/cv
You're reading 2 different quotes there, point and counter-point, something that should have been clear if you happened to click the links instead of being trigger happy about grabbing first post :P
The BBC supported OGG Vorbis long before any other mainstream news organization did. I'd take them at their word on this one.
And considering that they only froze the format this year, the fact that they haven't rolled it out to consumers is not exactly surprising- these things need baking time
Seriously, I think they've proven their commitment to patent-unencumbered formats...
I'm yet to see a single clip on BBC's website. They insist on running an ad from one of the major ad sites (might be doubleclick, I'm don't remember) before any clip loads. Since I have blocked most ad sites in my hosts file, the BBC clips never load.
As far as I'm concerned they could very well broadcast them in smoke signal format.
I had some email correspondence with a BBC tech shortly after they'd experimented with streaming ogg vorbis. He said they'd concluded that it wasn't sufficiently "scalable". I've never implemented anything on a scale like BBC World Service, so I don't know if there's anything to that or not, but perhaps there are slash dotters with the experience to comment.
When a lot of people complained about CBC pimping for Microsoft they set up streaming ogg vorbis for Toronto, but they haven't expanded it beyond that. I suppose they figured that was enough of a bone to throw us.
Loose lips lose spit.
I don't live in the U.K. so I can't use the BBC's iPlayer. Their reasoning (and part of the reason for all the protections in the first place) is because I'm not paying a TV license fee like everyone in the UK who has a TV has to, so I shouldn't benefit. At the same time, I read reports that the BBC has budgetary problems. I know that I would, and I'm sure many others would, be more than willing to pay the same yearly license fee plus something extra for not living in the UK to use the iPlayer. I wish I understood why the BBC wouldn't adopt a policy like that.
http://twitter.com/OLDTELEGRAM
The Ogg/Vorbis format is often touted as completely free and unencumbered by patents, but is it? Is Dirac?
This is the British Broadcasting Corporation so yes they are both completely patent free because there are no software patents allowed in the UK. It may be a problem for those in the US but why should the BBC worry about that?
A bit different for the BBC. I am not from the UK, but I believe that tax dollars pay for much of what is produced by the BBC. So actually you are not free to choose not to pay for it because the government is taxing you.
This is the entire reason for putting the content up on the web for free in the first place. The BBC is not trying to maximize their profit - they realize that UK citizens have already paid for the content. (Note that those outside the UK are not allowed to see it.) Being government run, they have a different mandate. This is why people are mad about the DRM - paying for something and then not getting it sucks.
frankly h.264 is a brillant piece of work and i can't really begrude it's creators for patenting it and making a buck. it's VERY low cost and it's getting wide adoption because of the very reasonable terms it's licensed under.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
In other news, Firefox 3.1 and some future version of Opera, will have built-in support of Ogg/Theora:
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roc/archives/2008/08/why_ogg_matters.html
Okay, so the BBC do need some way of getting their iPlayer on to Linux and other OSes, but as a Brit I'll quite happily say "give me the license fee system for the next thousand years instead of having to watch the drivel that is generally on the commercial channels and is interspersed with adverts".
The BBC has by far the best quality TV of all the channels I receive (and I'm not just on terrestrial or Free-to-air any more) and I get to watch shows uninterrupted. That's worth more than the other channels combined, especially when watching something like a sporting event or a film.
The BBC is *not* government run. They are publically funded, but the government has no direct control over their output.
It's not tax pounds (which would be taken out of your pay) but a license fee that you have to pay if you own any equipment that is capable of receiving a TV signal (e.g. TV, computer, certain mobile devices, etc) or IIRC a radio signal. If you don't have either of those then you don't need a TV license and you don't need to pay anything. If you do have one then it's £12 per month (~£140 per year), which IMO is a bargain for quality TV without adverts, especially when people are willing to pay £30+ per month for the drivel on satellite/cable complete with large ad breaks.
It is true that they have a mandate to be open to anyone with a license, though. Other than buying equipment, there isn't supposed to be any restriction on who can access the content and so operating systems etc aren't supposed to stop people accessing things.
The BBC have NO obligation to anyone, especially people who don't pay licence fee, to produce or adopt open source software. Their obligation is to provide good value for money whilst providing the best service to licence payers.
.h264 and AAC both cost so little for the BBC and any partners that using OGG/OGM would actively cost them more due to the inferior video compression. iPlayer eats insane amounts of bandwidth and if they can shrink videos down at all whilst maintaining quality it's in the BBC's best interests.
.h264 decoding compared to Theora. Would cost HW manufacturers a lot to add support for a format that's barely used.
That's not even taking into account the number of consumer devices that have hardware
OSS types complained when the BBC made iPlayer windows only at first (even though they always said it was in development for more platforms) but the BBC still responded by speeding up the development of a more compatible platform. The BBC have made great strides with their own video codec even if it's not quite ready. Services like iPlayer are/were ahead of their time and are showing the way for other broadcasters.
If the BBC do things like this yet only get people moaning in response, it'll make them wonder why they're spending licence fee's money on projects like these rather than giving their TV shows higher budgets or promoting HDTV adoption.
Except that the UK patent office has been challenged over their newer policy of not granting software patents and people have had to petition to get it officially unenforceable. They even granted a patent that the government appealed.
The general angle seems to be that the Patent Office has said they won't issue them, people don't want them, and the government will contest them, yet there are still some flying around.
And it's a very foolish or brave legislator who'd try to tamper with these regulations.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
All you need is a UK machine you can ssh to.
ssh -D 3128 host.co.uk
then set up a socks proxy at localhost:3128, and you can stream as much as you like. Fortunately there's a thriving UK internet industry so a shell account / virtual server / dedicated server / beowulf cluster shouldn't be too hard to find.
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. (Einstein)
Here you go, the BBC's Royal Charter under which it operates.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Okay, so the BBC do need some way of getting their iPlayer on to Linux and other OSes
If you can get Flash to work, you can view the iPlayer content: www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer. I do it all the time using Camino on OS X. To be honest I find this preferable to a P2P model anyway, although obviously the usual dire warnings about it overloading the intertubes as more people catch on apply.
Agree with you 100% about it being advert-free, too. I'm Canadian by birth and every time I go over to visit family, watching TV is like an exercise in self-control. I swear to Science the ratio of adverts:content is 1:1.
I have a dedicated server in London. When I go away on holiday, I start up Squid on the server, so I can still see BBC programmes while I'm away. I got to introduce my friends in the US to things like Top Gear and Little Britain this way (my American friends are 'worldly' enough to be able to understand the rather British-centric comedy).
I suspect the BBC iPlayer detects open proxies, however, if you own the machine, you can make sure they can't connect back to detect a proxy.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
I think it's even more complex than that as there are commercial arms within the BBC in charge of flogging the content. One part wants to move heaven and earth to get as much content out in as many ways as possible - the other half wants you to buy it on DVD.
It's a lot more complex than that.
The other half wants you to buy it on DVD but is only prepared to make the DVD available if there's sufficient commercial demand.
Furthermore, I'm given to understand that even a television programme produced entirely inhouse can be an absolute nightmare for licensing. Incidental music is licensed for use in the original broadcast and has to be relicensed or edited out if the programme is released on DVD, repeated or somehow rebroadcast (eg. through iPlayer). Similarly, actors, writers and journalists often retain some of the rights over their work and will want more money if the BBC wants the rights to release the show on DVD or repeat the show indefinitely. Not, therefore, something you write into the initial broadcast license unless you're pretty sure it's something that will be worth releasing on DVD.
I'm back on my old 1.5GHz G4 PowerBook at the moment, because my MacBook Pro is broken. On my MBP, with a Core 2 Duo processor, the Flash player took my CPU load up to around 60%. With the 1.5GHz G4, it simply fails - it drops frames all the time and the result is basically unwatchable.
Fortunately, there is the iplayer-dl script, which grabs the H.264 source file. I can then play this in Quicktime or VLC (Quicktime uses more CPU, but does much nicer postprocessing) - it looks better, doesn't drop frames, and my CPU usage is around 50%.
After using iplayer-dl, I have a DRM-free H.264 file with AAC audio that I can watch whenever I want, full screen on a second monitor without the player deciding to leave full screen mode whenever it loses focus (which Flash does). I can also copy it to a mobile device to take with my when I'm away from the Internet. I really wish the BBC would officially support this. Why can't they just offer the files for download for people who can't (or don't want to) use Flash? The fact that On6 is designed for low CPU usage, and the Flash decoder takes twice as much CPU as an H.264 decoder with decent postprocessing (about four times VLC) is just unacceptable.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
my American friends are 'worldly' enough to be able to understand the rather British-centric comedy
I've always understood the difference between American and British humour to be that British humour makes you laugh. No worldliness required.
Rubbish. You can own a TV that can be used to watch TV and so long as it is never switched on, you don't have to pay. I know, because this describes my situation a few years ago.
AAC is an open standard, as in the spec is publicly available for anyone.
There are even open source implementations:
- http://www.audiocoding.com/faac.html (encoder)
- http://www.audiocoding.com/faad2.html (decoder)
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
The BBC is not a company. It's primary goal is not to pay dividends to shareholders, it is to provide the best service to those who fund it, and nothing more. It is not commercial. The BBC has innovated a lot in the past, and if they did decide to go Ogg Vorbis and Theora, people would just go download the codecs. It's not a big deal.
The BBC was also instumental in the development of Dirac. From the FAQ at their Website:
Is the BBC going to stream video using Dirac?
A good question. Now we have version 1.0 of Schro, the BBC is exploring opportunities to adopt Dirac for operational use. We have real-time decoding, integration with players, a bytestream spec and a choice of transport stream formats.
This is why I can't stand the FSF. Sure guys, it would be nice if everything was open and free, but that is NEVER GOING TO HAPPEN.
I am reminded of an old saying: "Believing in something won't ensure it'll happen, but not believing in it does ensure it won't". Or something to that effect.
Stop expecting some big company to go exclusively with Ogg Vorbis and Theora, two codecs which have not been patent-tested in the courts
Even if we dismiss Xiph's efforts towards ensuring Ogg formats are patent-free, it's still better to have something that *could* be free of patents than something we know for a fact isn't. Specially if they want to say they're pushing for free formats, as is the case here.
No problem is insoluble in all conceivable circumstances.
Actually, Vorbis is used for a lot of game audio. So it's out there; it's just not very visible. And that's not just Free Software games made by "zealots," either: that list includes lots of A-list titles like the Unreal Tournament series, Rock Band, World of Warcraft, GTA: San Andreas, etc.
The reason Vorbis hasn't taken off for music is the same as for every other format: it's not MP3. Even AAC and WMA have only achieved a modicum of success, and that's only because Apple and Microsoft have been pushing them hard as vehicles for their DRM, forcing them to be the only formats you can legally download stuff in, etc.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz