8 ms·

BBC iPlayer begins to trial HTML5 player

138 points by jayflux 11y ago

unfamiliar 11y ago
I was excited for this, only to find that it doesn't support Safari on OS X. I truly do not understand why not. It already works on iOS, which presumably uses the same webkit. Safari is the default browser on OS X where flash doesn't come pre-installed; but yay, it works with Chrome on OS X which already has flash baked into it. This is made more irritating by the fact that setting the User Agent to "iPad" on OS X has always yielded a perfectly functional HTML5 player.
- IshKebab 11y ago
  Because it is still using a plugin. It's just that the plugin only handles decryption and display of video content now, and is called a Content Decryption Module (CDM) rather than "Flash". That plugin must be closed source and must be ported to any platform that uses it by whoever wrote it (I think Adobe have one, and probably Microsoft too). In some ways this is a step back from Flash.
  - jzwinck 11y ago
    I wonder why they feel the need to encrypt public television. Is it so spies cannot find out what you're watching?
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    - johneth 11y ago
      Usually rights reasons. A lot of the stuff they show is owned by other companies (films, sports, etc.). They also commission a lot of stuff from outside production companies who want to be able to commercialise it in other ways afterwards (e.g. sell it on to Netflix afterwards, show on repeat channels, etc.). Other reasons include not owning the rights to things within the show, most notably music.
      - click170 11y ago
        I thought licensing music wasn't an issue with many BBC shows as long as they could be fairly categorized as Documentary. Eg Top Gear got away with using music from many famous films in almost every show, I thought this is how they were allowed to do that. And their "documentary" status is questionable.
    - nicktelford 11y ago
      It's encrypted to prevent other software/hardware from intercepting the signal and recording it. It's DRM.
      - deleted 11y ago
        [deleted]
    - de_dave 11y ago
      As was once explained to me by someone with very close ties to iPlayer, it's because these are the requirements that the production companies of the programmes they broadcast insist upon. This extends to their own output due to rights issues, as much of it is licenced out to their commercial arms too.
  - BillinghamJ 11y ago
    This is a bit misleading. The "plugin" you mention is not something the user installs - it is usually bundled with the browser or OS. For example, Apple's is called FairPlay. It's automatically embedded in every iOS device, Apple TV, Apple Watch, and Mac. It is able to decrypt the content streamed from approved providers. Of course, it is closed source, but that does not make it insecure or dangerous. The vast majority of your Mac is closed source and has an awful lot more privileges than FairPlay.
    - yarrel 11y ago
      A plugin designed to conceal what your computer is doing from you and make it work against you is by definition insecure and dangerous. Encyrypted content is trivial to record and redistribute for reasons that Cory Doctorow spelled out to tech companies a decade ago. That those companies are still pretending otherwise is leading to them perverting the operation of network and systems software.
      - jcranmer 11y ago
        The tech companies know that DRM is pointless. The problem is that they don't get to decide to not use it: it's the content producers who insist on inane maximal DRM, and refuse to let companies license/broadcast the material without it.
  - LloydW93 11y ago
    The content the player uses has no DRM, and it doesn't use EME. Not sure why anyone thinks otherwise...
  - kozukumi 11y ago
    I have DRM content disabled in Firefox (41; Windows 10) and it plays using the HTML5 player just fine.
    - acqq 11y ago
      I can't verify as I get "BBC iPlayer TV programmes are available to play in the UK only." And I'm really not in the UK, that's true. Are there any links that aren't UK only and fully use the new technology?
      - kozukumi 11y ago
        iPlayer is IP-location restricted. You can get around it with a VPN that allows you to pick exit IP location.
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
  They want to use Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (which YouTube now uses too), and I guess OS X Safari doesn't support it yet?
BillinghamJ 11y ago
Not available for Safari on desktop at the moment :\
Already__Taken 11y ago
> However, we’ve been regularly evaluating the features offered by the most popular web browsers and we’re now confident we can achieve the playback quality you’d expect from the BBC without using a third-party plugin. This is just about EME extensions is it not?
- padenot 11y ago
  Probaby MSE.
- TD-Linux 11y ago
  Yes. It sounds like they are not using EME, which is great! It means that it'll be much easier to support on all browsers in the future.
logn 11y ago
I'll be very happy when this is available for live streams. But I preferred the PLS streams for audio which were seemingly disconnected a year or two ago.
Paul_S 11y ago
BBC is state funded yet it competes with all the other big companies to become as technologically obsolete as possible. The story of get_iplayer is a testament to this. I'm trying to think of companies that understand this but I can only think of GOG. Is there a similar company for films or music?
- johneth 11y ago
  Not sure what you mean. Does moving away from Flash mean they're becoming technologically obsolete?
  - Paul_S 11y ago
    They are moving from one non-free player to another non-free player. That's what I mean.
- JamesBaxter 11y ago
  I don't understand what you mean either. The BBC had to protect the content they were delivering or content creators likely wouldn't allow it on the service. Presumably they shut down RTMP streams because open source clients were delivering content outside the UK. Seems reasonable to me.
  - Paul_S 11y ago
    They don't have to, but they want to. They could say they will not accept content that requires DRM, just like GOG does. BBC is state funded so it should be easier for it (easier than for a for profit company like GOG) to not be evil.
    - pidg 11y ago
      Having actually spoken to some of the people who work on this stuff at the BBC, they don't want to. They want to make as much quality television accessible to as many people as possible. In fact, internal systems already exist for accessing any BBC programme from the last (n) years. There's also a system for schools and universities that gives you access to the last year or so of programming. It's pressures from external production companies that prevent these from being rolled out to the public. However, there will always be rights issues until the state has complete ownership over all TV production - which is never going to happen. (Also - what's 'evil' about content creators wanting to protect their intellectual property and income?)
cognivore 11y ago
I think that this is an excellent example of the pathetic state of HTML 5 and web UI in general. All they want to do is play video with some UI around it. It's 2015, that should be almost trivial. But it's not. It's beta and broken in some OS's. What the heck? Why aren't we at the place where we have, "Oh yeah, playback video - here's the library, used by everyone, rock solid, works everywhere," and off you go. How can things still be this broken?
- AimToMisbehave 11y ago
  "here's the library, used by everyone, rock solid, works everywhere" Almost like Flash used to be :)
- bosdev 11y ago
  The simple answer is the browser as a platform stalled for ten years or so (the "Flash Era"). It's only very recently that real work was put into adding new capabilities like video playback (See the WHATWG conflict). Beyond that, I would add that the natural complexity of video encoding and the legalities which surround it complicate things. The video playback implementation bundled into the browsers is simpler than what you might find in something like VLC, making it a bit less capable of handling all the potential oddities a video can have. You have to actually encode your video in multiple formats, and even then be very careful, to get it to actually play in every browser at the moment. Hopefully these things will stabilize in the near future, but it's early days.
- jonknee 11y ago
  It is if you just want to play video with some UI around it, but they don't want to do that. They want to encrypt it.
  - coldpie 11y ago
    On top of that, there's all sorts of IP issues around popular video codecs, meaning no one codec is supported on all browsers. In short, blame rights holders.
  - TD-Linux 11y ago
JupiterMoon 11y ago
So goodbye to BBC iplayer on Linux soon then? That day I will stop paying my licence fee (perfectly legally as I don't view live TV anyway).
- ysr23 11y ago
  No, they state they are testing and expect it to work on chrome under linux. Also, you don't need a licence if you are watching catch-up tv
- aembleton 11y ago
  Works for me on Chrome in Linux
- MacsHeadroom 11y ago
  More like goodbye vulnerable and out of date Flash Player on Linux. The HTML5 iplayer works (better) in Firefox on Linux already.
  - wjoe 11y ago
    It doesn't work for me with Firefox on Linux, and they state it's not supported (yet?). What version are you running?
bhauer 11y ago
Running Firefox 43 here. Either I'm doing something wrong or it's not compatible with my installation of Firefox. I've opted in for HTML 5 video, but when I attempt to play a news video, I am still prompted to install Flash Player. As an aside, am I crazy, or is it weird that neither the blog page or the opt-in page embed a video for testing or even link to a video for testing? I don't know where to find an instance of "iPlayer" on the BBC site (on the off chance that's different than the video player they use for news items). I searched for what one might call a traditional television program on their home page, but that didn't work either. I clicked the play icon on the "Featured Video" on the home page and was again prompted to install Flash. I'm happy to hear about the effort, but not yet thrilled with the results.
- DanBC 11y ago
  Anything on here. http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer
- gdrulia 11y ago
  Not sure how it works for not UK users, but if you accessing BBC from UK, main menu at the top has `IPLAYER` button [0]. Any program I choose from there will use HTML5. Anywhere else, that includes news videos and live TV, HTML5 is not an option. [0] - http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer
  - tombrossman 11y ago
    That button isn't displayed if you are outside the UK, which causes some confusion. I guess it's a simpler solution than redirecting to an error page.
    - qqg3 11y ago
      Which makes sense, because you're not supposed to be using iPlayer outside the UK.
- aembleton 11y ago
  News clips continue to use Flash. They've just implemented this on the iPlayer website.
SeanLuke 11y ago
Could the headline be changed? It's not the same as the original headline, and trial is not a verb, except as a very recent (post 1990) colloquialism. Verbing nouns is annoying, particularly when there are perfectly good words to use: "try" or "test".
- unfamiliar 11y ago
  >trial is not a verb, except as a very recent (post 1990) colloquialism Are we not in post-1990?
  - SeanLuke 11y ago
    Colloquialisms are not standard vocabulary. But more to the point, this isn't the original headline: because the BBC has editors.
- garethadams 11y ago
  "Google" is not a verb, except as a very recent (post 2003)[1] colloquialism. Verbing nouns is annoying, let's hope no one[2] does it. [1]: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/3006486.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/3006486.stm [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10016502 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10016502
yarrel 11y ago
The BBC pushing DRM again. They could take a stand against it, but no, they're an attack vector for it. There are people in the BBC who are as infuriated by this as everyone else. I continue to hope that they will be able to pull some of their more ambitious plans off.
andreineculau 11y ago
Meanwhile at ITV... https://itvplayer.uservoice.com/forums/247805-general/suggestions/8759230-html5-support-would-increase-target-audience-and-s https://itvplayer.uservoice.com/forums/247805-general/sugges...
porsupah 11y ago
The puzzling part, for me, is that iPlayer already happily serves plain H.264/AAC within MPEG-4 to mobile devices. Having removed Flash from my MBP a few months ago, the simplest means of accessing iPlayer for me, when not on the iPad, is just having OmniWeb identify as an iPad to the BBC. A sample user agent: "Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; CPU OS 6_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/536.26 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/6.0 Mobile/10A5355d Safari/8536.25"
- arm 11y ago
  Whoa, I’m pretty surprised. I thought Omni abandoned OmniWeb quite a long time ago, but it seems to still be getting updates! http://omnistaging.omnigroup.com/omniweb/ http://omnistaging.omnigroup.com/omniweb/
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
ris 11y ago
Just waiting for them to do it for radio too now. Haven't been able to listen to missed radio shows since the big radio/iplayer shakeup.
- mdaniel 11y ago
  I believe you'll find the shows here, and in other "radio aggregator" sites: http://tunein.com/radio/BBC-Radio-1-988-s24939/ http://tunein.com/radio/BBC-Radio-1-988-s24939/ I've heard from a guy who knows a guy that it's super easy to time-shift those streams into a local file, too.
  - ris 11y ago
    Excellent, thank you!
keeperofdakeys 11y ago
I think it's interesting to note that they don't even bother listing the required version for google chrome http://blog.codinghorror.com/the-infinite-version/ http://blog.codinghorror.com/the-infinite-version/
- mdaniel 11y ago
  If they listed a specific version, from where would you download it? My current Chrome is "45.0.2454.101 (64-bit)" but I couldn't tell you if my life depended on it what version I had last week (44? 45.023? who knows?).

138 points by jayflux 11y ago

I was excited for this, only to find that it doesn't support Safari on OS X. I truly do not understand why not. It already works on iOS, which presumably uses the same webkit. Safari is the default browser on OS X where flash doesn't come pre-installed; but yay, it works with Chrome on OS X which already has flash baked into it. This is made more irritating by the fact that setting the User Agent to "iPad" on OS X has always yielded a perfectly functional HTML5 player.

IshKebab 11y ago
Because it is still using a plugin. It's just that the plugin only handles decryption and display of video content now, and is called a Content Decryption Module (CDM) rather than "Flash". That plugin must be closed source and must be ported to any platform that uses it by whoever wrote it (I think Adobe have one, and probably Microsoft too). In some ways this is a step back from Flash.
- jzwinck 11y ago
  I wonder why they feel the need to encrypt public television. Is it so spies cannot find out what you're watching?
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - johneth 11y ago
    Usually rights reasons. A lot of the stuff they show is owned by other companies (films, sports, etc.). They also commission a lot of stuff from outside production companies who want to be able to commercialise it in other ways afterwards (e.g. sell it on to Netflix afterwards, show on repeat channels, etc.). Other reasons include not owning the rights to things within the show, most notably music.
    - click170 11y ago
      I thought licensing music wasn't an issue with many BBC shows as long as they could be fairly categorized as Documentary. Eg Top Gear got away with using music from many famous films in almost every show, I thought this is how they were allowed to do that. And their "documentary" status is questionable.
  - nicktelford 11y ago
    It's encrypted to prevent other software/hardware from intercepting the signal and recording it. It's DRM.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
  - de_dave 11y ago
    As was once explained to me by someone with very close ties to iPlayer, it's because these are the requirements that the production companies of the programmes they broadcast insist upon. This extends to their own output due to rights issues, as much of it is licenced out to their commercial arms too.
- BillinghamJ 11y ago
  This is a bit misleading. The "plugin" you mention is not something the user installs - it is usually bundled with the browser or OS. For example, Apple's is called FairPlay. It's automatically embedded in every iOS device, Apple TV, Apple Watch, and Mac. It is able to decrypt the content streamed from approved providers. Of course, it is closed source, but that does not make it insecure or dangerous. The vast majority of your Mac is closed source and has an awful lot more privileges than FairPlay.
  - yarrel 11y ago
    A plugin designed to conceal what your computer is doing from you and make it work against you is by definition insecure and dangerous. Encyrypted content is trivial to record and redistribute for reasons that Cory Doctorow spelled out to tech companies a decade ago. That those companies are still pretending otherwise is leading to them perverting the operation of network and systems software.
    - jcranmer 11y ago
      The tech companies know that DRM is pointless. The problem is that they don't get to decide to not use it: it's the content producers who insist on inane maximal DRM, and refuse to let companies license/broadcast the material without it.
- LloydW93 11y ago
  The content the player uses has no DRM, and it doesn't use EME. Not sure why anyone thinks otherwise...
- kozukumi 11y ago
  I have DRM content disabled in Firefox (41; Windows 10) and it plays using the HTML5 player just fine.
  - acqq 11y ago
    I can't verify as I get "BBC iPlayer TV programmes are available to play in the UK only." And I'm really not in the UK, that's true. Are there any links that aren't UK only and fully use the new technology?
    - kozukumi 11y ago
      iPlayer is IP-location restricted. You can get around it with a VPN that allows you to pick exit IP location.
TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
They want to use Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (which YouTube now uses too), and I guess OS X Safari doesn't support it yet?

BillinghamJ 11y ago

Not available for Safari on desktop at the moment :\

Already__Taken 11y ago

> However, we’ve been regularly evaluating the features offered by the most popular web browsers and we’re now confident we can achieve the playback quality you’d expect from the BBC without using a third-party plugin. This is just about EME extensions is it not?

padenot 11y ago
Probaby MSE.
TD-Linux 11y ago
Yes. It sounds like they are not using EME, which is great! It means that it'll be much easier to support on all browsers in the future.

logn 11y ago

I'll be very happy when this is available for live streams. But I preferred the PLS streams for audio which were seemingly disconnected a year or two ago.

Paul_S 11y ago

BBC is state funded yet it competes with all the other big companies to become as technologically obsolete as possible. The story of get_iplayer is a testament to this. I'm trying to think of companies that understand this but I can only think of GOG. Is there a similar company for films or music?

johneth 11y ago
Not sure what you mean. Does moving away from Flash mean they're becoming technologically obsolete?
- Paul_S 11y ago
  They are moving from one non-free player to another non-free player. That's what I mean.
JamesBaxter 11y ago
I don't understand what you mean either. The BBC had to protect the content they were delivering or content creators likely wouldn't allow it on the service. Presumably they shut down RTMP streams because open source clients were delivering content outside the UK. Seems reasonable to me.
- Paul_S 11y ago
  They don't have to, but they want to. They could say they will not accept content that requires DRM, just like GOG does. BBC is state funded so it should be easier for it (easier than for a for profit company like GOG) to not be evil.
  - pidg 11y ago
    Having actually spoken to some of the people who work on this stuff at the BBC, they don't want to. They want to make as much quality television accessible to as many people as possible. In fact, internal systems already exist for accessing any BBC programme from the last (n) years. There's also a system for schools and universities that gives you access to the last year or so of programming. It's pressures from external production companies that prevent these from being rolled out to the public. However, there will always be rights issues until the state has complete ownership over all TV production - which is never going to happen. (Also - what's 'evil' about content creators wanting to protect their intellectual property and income?)

cognivore 11y ago

I think that this is an excellent example of the pathetic state of HTML 5 and web UI in general. All they want to do is play video with some UI around it. It's 2015, that should be almost trivial. But it's not. It's beta and broken in some OS's. What the heck? Why aren't we at the place where we have, "Oh yeah, playback video - here's the library, used by everyone, rock solid, works everywhere," and off you go. How can things still be this broken?

AimToMisbehave 11y ago
"here's the library, used by everyone, rock solid, works everywhere" Almost like Flash used to be :)
bosdev 11y ago
The simple answer is the browser as a platform stalled for ten years or so (the "Flash Era"). It's only very recently that real work was put into adding new capabilities like video playback (See the WHATWG conflict). Beyond that, I would add that the natural complexity of video encoding and the legalities which surround it complicate things. The video playback implementation bundled into the browsers is simpler than what you might find in something like VLC, making it a bit less capable of handling all the potential oddities a video can have. You have to actually encode your video in multiple formats, and even then be very careful, to get it to actually play in every browser at the moment. Hopefully these things will stabilize in the near future, but it's early days.
jonknee 11y ago
It is if you just want to play video with some UI around it, but they don't want to do that. They want to encrypt it.
- coldpie 11y ago
  On top of that, there's all sorts of IP issues around popular video codecs, meaning no one codec is supported on all browsers. In short, blame rights holders.
- TD-Linux 11y ago

JupiterMoon 11y ago

So goodbye to BBC iplayer on Linux soon then? That day I will stop paying my licence fee (perfectly legally as I don't view live TV anyway).

ysr23 11y ago
No, they state they are testing and expect it to work on chrome under linux. Also, you don't need a licence if you are watching catch-up tv
aembleton 11y ago
Works for me on Chrome in Linux
MacsHeadroom 11y ago
More like goodbye vulnerable and out of date Flash Player on Linux. The HTML5 iplayer works (better) in Firefox on Linux already.
- wjoe 11y ago
  It doesn't work for me with Firefox on Linux, and they state it's not supported (yet?). What version are you running?

bhauer 11y ago

Running Firefox 43 here. Either I'm doing something wrong or it's not compatible with my installation of Firefox. I've opted in for HTML 5 video, but when I attempt to play a news video, I am still prompted to install Flash Player. As an aside, am I crazy, or is it weird that neither the blog page or the opt-in page embed a video for testing or even link to a video for testing? I don't know where to find an instance of "iPlayer" on the BBC site (on the off chance that's different than the video player they use for news items). I searched for what one might call a traditional television program on their home page, but that didn't work either. I clicked the play icon on the "Featured Video" on the home page and was again prompted to install Flash. I'm happy to hear about the effort, but not yet thrilled with the results.

DanBC 11y ago
Anything on here. http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer
gdrulia 11y ago
Not sure how it works for not UK users, but if you accessing BBC from UK, main menu at the top has `IPLAYER` button [0]. Any program I choose from there will use HTML5. Anywhere else, that includes news videos and live TV, HTML5 is not an option. [0] - http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer
- tombrossman 11y ago
  That button isn't displayed if you are outside the UK, which causes some confusion. I guess it's a simpler solution than redirecting to an error page.
  - qqg3 11y ago
    Which makes sense, because you're not supposed to be using iPlayer outside the UK.
aembleton 11y ago
News clips continue to use Flash. They've just implemented this on the iPlayer website.

SeanLuke 11y ago

Could the headline be changed? It's not the same as the original headline, and trial is not a verb, except as a very recent (post 1990) colloquialism. Verbing nouns is annoying, particularly when there are perfectly good words to use: "try" or "test".

unfamiliar 11y ago
>trial is not a verb, except as a very recent (post 1990) colloquialism Are we not in post-1990?
- SeanLuke 11y ago
  Colloquialisms are not standard vocabulary. But more to the point, this isn't the original headline: because the BBC has editors.
garethadams 11y ago
"Google" is not a verb, except as a very recent (post 2003)[1] colloquialism. Verbing nouns is annoying, let's hope no one[2] does it. [1]: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/3006486.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/3006486.stm [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10016502 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10016502

yarrel 11y ago

The BBC pushing DRM again. They could take a stand against it, but no, they're an attack vector for it. There are people in the BBC who are as infuriated by this as everyone else. I continue to hope that they will be able to pull some of their more ambitious plans off.

andreineculau 11y ago

Meanwhile at ITV... https://itvplayer.uservoice.com/forums/247805-general/suggestions/8759230-html5-support-would-increase-target-audience-and-s https://itvplayer.uservoice.com/forums/247805-general/sugges...

porsupah 11y ago

The puzzling part, for me, is that iPlayer already happily serves plain H.264/AAC within MPEG-4 to mobile devices. Having removed Flash from my MBP a few months ago, the simplest means of accessing iPlayer for me, when not on the iPad, is just having OmniWeb identify as an iPad to the BBC. A sample user agent: "Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; CPU OS 6_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/536.26 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/6.0 Mobile/10A5355d Safari/8536.25"

arm 11y ago
Whoa, I’m pretty surprised. I thought Omni abandoned OmniWeb quite a long time ago, but it seems to still be getting updates! http://omnistaging.omnigroup.com/omniweb/ http://omnistaging.omnigroup.com/omniweb/

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

ris 11y ago

Just waiting for them to do it for radio too now. Haven't been able to listen to missed radio shows since the big radio/iplayer shakeup.

mdaniel 11y ago
I believe you'll find the shows here, and in other "radio aggregator" sites: http://tunein.com/radio/BBC-Radio-1-988-s24939/ http://tunein.com/radio/BBC-Radio-1-988-s24939/ I've heard from a guy who knows a guy that it's super easy to time-shift those streams into a local file, too.
- ris 11y ago
  Excellent, thank you!

keeperofdakeys 11y ago

I think it's interesting to note that they don't even bother listing the required version for google chrome http://blog.codinghorror.com/the-infinite-version/ http://blog.codinghorror.com/the-infinite-version/

mdaniel 11y ago
If they listed a specific version, from where would you download it? My current Chrome is "45.0.2454.101 (64-bit)" but I couldn't tell you if my life depended on it what version I had last week (44? 45.023? who knows?).