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.'"

Comments

What about Dirac?

[siDDis]

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?

Re:What about Dirac?

[iangoldby]

From TFA:

Some people may ask: why are you not using your own Dirac codec? I am fully committed to the development and success of Dirac, but for now those efforts are focused on high-end broadcast applications. This autumn, we intend to show the world what can be achieved with these technologies.

Patent free for the BBC

[Roger W Moore]

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?

Re:How can the BBCs licence model work over the ne

[IBBoard]

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.

Re:Stop Complaining

[Spad]

The BBC is *not* government run. They are publically funded, but the government has no direct control over their output.

Re:This is mildly offtopic but still apropos...

[Spad]

It's not so much that you don't pay the license fee but that the various 3rd parties who produce programming for the BBC don't want their foreign market profits affected by allowing people outside the UK to view their shows on the BBC website, rather than on their 'local' TV stations.

Whining

[abigsmurf]

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.
That's not even taking into account the number of consumer devices that have hardware .h264 decoding compared to Theora. Would cost HW manufacturers a lot to add support for a format that's barely used.
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.

Re:How can the BBCs licence model work over the ne

[clare-ents]

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.