iPlayer Released for Mac, Linux; Adobe Announces AIR for Linux

Zoxed writes "The BBC reports that their iPlayer has just been released for Mac and Linux (download page). It is based on Adobe Air, but unfortunately the service is only available to UK IP address, so I can not test it out from my adopted homeland of Germany. Perhaps a UK-based Slashdotter could review it?" In related news, an anonymous reader writes "Adobe has announced a Linux version of its AIR 1.5 runtime environment that is supposed to allow rich web apps developed on it to run on Fedora Core 8, Ubuntu 7.10 and openSuse 10.3 with no modification. The company released versions for Windows and Mac OS X back in November."

Comments

Air/Flash License

[ink]

Additionally, Air and Flash have some hefty licensing restrictions. From Adobe:

For the avoidance of doubt, and by example only, Distributor shall not distribute any Adobe Runtime for use on any (a) mobile device, set top box (STB), handheld, phone, web pad, tablet or Tablet PC (other than Windows XP Tablet PC Edition and its successors), game console, TV, DVD player, media center (other than Windows XP Media Center Edition and its successors), electronic billboard or other digital signage, internet appliance or other internet-connected device, PDA, medical device, ATM, telematic device, gaming machine, home automation system, kiosk, remote control device, or any other consumer electronics device, (b) operator-based mobile, cable, satellite, or television system or (c) other closed system device. For information on licensing Adobe Runtimes for use or distribution on devices see http://www.adobe.com/licensing.

So, they can call it "free" all they want, but it isn't even free-as-in-beer free.

Re:Air/Flash License

[chrb]

iPlayer-Downloader has no licensing restrictions and no DRM :-)

Re:Air/Flash License

[ink]

I wish every developer would look past proprietary things like Flash and AIR and use web standards instead, but I know this will never happen.

MythTV can't legally use this product -- and not for lame patent reasons, but for copyright laws (it's a set-top box). We'll be stuck with Adobe's runtime until an open standard takes off. Developers can indeed "look past" proprietary things like Flash. They do it all the time when they develop for the web, and they take it for granted until things like this happen. Hopefully HTML5 will use an unencumbered standard for audio and video (such as Ogg/Vorbis). That, coupled with SVG and traditional web technologies would give us the "run time" that we need to keep the web free.

Re:Proxies ?

[FugitiveMind]

http://samair.ru/proxy/

Re:Proxy, anyone?

[Tatsh]

Streaming works fine over proxy; currently watching Apparitions

Re:potential of Air ?

[greg_barton]

However, there's just nothing else out there right now with the same mix of capabilities...

Oh, really?

Re:IPlayer UK only

[thetoadwarrior]

Who is paying £1,000 for a TV licence? It's £139.50, dumb ass.

My Experiences So Far

[TheRealJFM]

I've installed AIR and the iPlayer downloader, and so far neither have really worked.

Granted this is probably because I'm using 64-bit Linux, and they don't seem to support it yet (not that I was told this at any stage of the installation process, or the website where I downloaded the installer.

To get the thing installed on 64-bit I followed these instructions, and then proceeded to the BBC website to download something. Nothing seemed to work, no download links appeared. I then followed the links to an episode of Never Mind The Buzzcocks that other people reported was working. This time a download link appeared, but clicking it took me to install the program again.

To figure out why it wasn't working, I ran the downloader from the command line. It was printing the following: "Unkown desktop manager((null)), only Gnome and KDE are supported". Aha... I'm using XFCE, yet it must use the inter-process communication of either one of those desktops...

Booted into Gnome, and tried again. This time it tells me that it wants libgnome-keyring.so - I realise that no preferences are savable - it must be saving prefs with the keyring. I think that's a bit odd - what's wrong with ~/.Adobe/AIR?

After installing 32-bit libraries for gnome-keyring, the thing still doesn't work, and still won't download anything.

The problem with this application, or rather with Adobe AIR, is the series of arbitrary choices the designers seem to have made. Linux is not a platform where you can assume many things - and it would have probably made more sense to pick some generic ways of getting things done (there's a reason that text-files have always been used for config!) rather than relying upon fairly specific libraries for basic tasks and then not even falling back to a sane alternative. Perhaps a 64-bit version will fix all of this, I certainly hope so!