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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'

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
  Is there any evidence that they use EME? As far as I can tell, they don't.
  - jonknee 11y ago
    http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/internet/entries/19d875b8-c966-465b-880a-e38c71900c4c http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/internet/entries/19d875b8-c966-46... > started taking advantage of Media Source Extensions via the dash.js project. That means they're using Javascript to decode encrypted video. It's a ridiculous way to play video. It also is the entire reason for this nugget: > We plan to continue supporting Flash on the desktop for at least the next few years. This is partly because playing video using HTML5 requires a more powerful computer than Flash, and we don’t want to leave behind those users who cannot, or do not wish to, upgrade. In the real world HTML5 video does not require a more powerful computer than with Flash. Trying to do it with Javascript is pathetic. If anyone wants to rip your content they still will since it's video playing on your computer. Not to mention it's a publicly owned company!
    - exodust 11y ago
      If what you say is true, the iPlayer HTML player might actually chew through a laptop battery quicker than iPlayer Flash. That would be funny. I hope someone does a side by side measuring cpu cycles, or some other performance metric. My money is on a Flash winner.
    - TD-Linux 11y ago
      MSE != EME. MSE just means they are using DASH to funnel video into the <video> element. Those video chunks are normally unencrypted.
rkangel 11y ago
> But it's not. It's beta and broken in some OS's iPlayer works for a very large number of people on an enormous variety of platforms. Whatever you're trying to implement across that range is going to produce compatibility problems.
cnorthwood 11y ago
the problem is, they don't want to "just" play video. On Flash they've been using a technology called HLS/HDS which does things like very the bitrate of the video depending on the speed of the connection, it's not just a matter of putting a video tag on a page.
tombrossman 11y ago
I disagree with how you've framed this. When you say "All they want to do is play video with some UI around it." that is solved, it's fairly easy and works fine. At issue here is DRM and the BBC's need (probably contractually mandated by the rights holders) to control what you can do with their content on your devices. It's about control, not about simple delivery. I use Linux only and when I visited the opt-in page with Firefox I received the following error message: "Sorry, we can't provide you with the HTML5 Player beta because your browser doesn't support Media Source Extensions. Please try another browser. Only Google Chrome is supported on your platform at this time." Testing the same page with Chromium and it worked fine. I won't use Chrome and won't install Flash so I was pleased to see it working with Chromium. Looking at the bigger picture, it's still easier for me to use youtube-dl and grab the videos that way. The quality is higher and even on my gigabit fiber broadband, I got some buffering and the frame rate dropped which showed significant tearing in the playback. At least CPU use was much lower than with Flash. The future isn't Flash, it's HTML5 video and I'm pleased to finally have something that works for us Linux users who don't use Flash. Nice work BBC iPlayer team and if any of you are reading this comment I say thanks. Edit: formatting
- TD-Linux 11y ago
  As far as I can tell, iPlayer isn't using EME.
- cpeterso 11y ago
  MSE on Linux does not yet support MP4/H.264. If your Linux system has an H.264 decoder, you can try flipping this about:config pref: media.mediasource.mp4.enabled = true
- PuffinBlue 11y ago
  If you're using Linux or are getting the media from Youtube you might be interested in a tool to get the video from the BBC directly: get_iplayer - https://squarepenguin.co.uk https://squarepenguin.co.uk
  - tombrossman 11y ago
TD-Linux 11y ago
"Just" video in HTML5 is actually trivial. You just put a video in a <video> element and you're set. Maybe put multiple resolutions in and a button to switch out the src. If you want the additional compression of VP9, you can put both a WebM source and a MP4 source in the <video> element and the browser will pick the better one, no Javascript required. As an example, I think 4chan has the simplest possible user submitted video hosting possible. They don't even need an encoding pipeline, they just serve user submitted WebM files < 3MB. It works quite well. Where it becomes harder is if you want to do complex things, like slice up content in Javascript to insert ads, manually control buffering with Javascript, try to estimate bandwidth, etc. These are harder right now because the MSE API is pretty new and used by very few websites.

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
Is there any evidence that they use EME? As far as I can tell, they don't.
- jonknee 11y ago
  http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/internet/entries/19d875b8-c966-465b-880a-e38c71900c4c http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/internet/entries/19d875b8-c966-46... > started taking advantage of Media Source Extensions via the dash.js project. That means they're using Javascript to decode encrypted video. It's a ridiculous way to play video. It also is the entire reason for this nugget: > We plan to continue supporting Flash on the desktop for at least the next few years. This is partly because playing video using HTML5 requires a more powerful computer than Flash, and we don’t want to leave behind those users who cannot, or do not wish to, upgrade. In the real world HTML5 video does not require a more powerful computer than with Flash. Trying to do it with Javascript is pathetic. If anyone wants to rip your content they still will since it's video playing on your computer. Not to mention it's a publicly owned company!
  - exodust 11y ago
    If what you say is true, the iPlayer HTML player might actually chew through a laptop battery quicker than iPlayer Flash. That would be funny. I hope someone does a side by side measuring cpu cycles, or some other performance metric. My money is on a Flash winner.
  - TD-Linux 11y ago
    MSE != EME. MSE just means they are using DASH to funnel video into the <video> element. Those video chunks are normally unencrypted.

rkangel 11y ago

> But it's not. It's beta and broken in some OS's iPlayer works for a very large number of people on an enormous variety of platforms. Whatever you're trying to implement across that range is going to produce compatibility problems.

cnorthwood 11y ago

the problem is, they don't want to "just" play video. On Flash they've been using a technology called HLS/HDS which does things like very the bitrate of the video depending on the speed of the connection, it's not just a matter of putting a video tag on a page.

tombrossman 11y ago

I disagree with how you've framed this. When you say "All they want to do is play video with some UI around it." that is solved, it's fairly easy and works fine. At issue here is DRM and the BBC's need (probably contractually mandated by the rights holders) to control what you can do with their content on your devices. It's about control, not about simple delivery. I use Linux only and when I visited the opt-in page with Firefox I received the following error message: "Sorry, we can't provide you with the HTML5 Player beta because your browser doesn't support Media Source Extensions. Please try another browser. Only Google Chrome is supported on your platform at this time." Testing the same page with Chromium and it worked fine. I won't use Chrome and won't install Flash so I was pleased to see it working with Chromium. Looking at the bigger picture, it's still easier for me to use youtube-dl and grab the videos that way. The quality is higher and even on my gigabit fiber broadband, I got some buffering and the frame rate dropped which showed significant tearing in the playback. At least CPU use was much lower than with Flash. The future isn't Flash, it's HTML5 video and I'm pleased to finally have something that works for us Linux users who don't use Flash. Nice work BBC iPlayer team and if any of you are reading this comment I say thanks. Edit: formatting

TD-Linux 11y ago
As far as I can tell, iPlayer isn't using EME.
cpeterso 11y ago
MSE on Linux does not yet support MP4/H.264. If your Linux system has an H.264 decoder, you can try flipping this about:config pref: media.mediasource.mp4.enabled = true
PuffinBlue 11y ago
If you're using Linux or are getting the media from Youtube you might be interested in a tool to get the video from the BBC directly: get_iplayer - https://squarepenguin.co.uk https://squarepenguin.co.uk
- tombrossman 11y ago

TD-Linux 11y ago

"Just" video in HTML5 is actually trivial. You just put a video in a <video> element and you're set. Maybe put multiple resolutions in and a button to switch out the src. If you want the additional compression of VP9, you can put both a WebM source and a MP4 source in the <video> element and the browser will pick the better one, no Javascript required. As an example, I think 4chan has the simplest possible user submitted video hosting possible. They don't even need an encoding pipeline, they just serve user submitted WebM files < 3MB. It works quite well. Where it becomes harder is if you want to do complex things, like slice up content in Javascript to insert ads, manually control buffering with Javascript, try to estimate bandwidth, etc. These are harder right now because the MSE API is pretty new and used by very few websites.