4 ms·

IPlayer Performance tricks behind the scenes

2 points by danw 18y ago

gaius 18y ago
Look, BBC, you haven't done anything clever here. The British taxpayer OWNS you. We own every programme in your archive, we're already paid for them. Rather than wasting time and money on this you should have made your entire catalogue available for download in an open format like MPEG. A proprietary, DRM-laden format on public property is an outrage.
- handelaar 18y ago
  The actual link, which this comment doesn't have any relevance to at all, describes (in rather too shallow detail for my taste) what the iPlayer's built with and how they scale the front end. The link's about code and development and deployment: Hacker News stuff. Your comment is about none of those things. Ranting that "you haven't done anything clever" because you don't like their streaming format? Please, I beg you, take it back to Slashdot.
  - gaius 18y ago
    No, it is completely relevant. The BBC should not have spent taxpayer's money on any of this. Everything they needed to make the archive available for download in MPEG is freely available. Expending vast resources to solve a non-existant problem in an overly complicated manner is the exact opposite of the hacker/startup ethos. Not only that but this is the BBC publishing an article on how great the BBC is. That alone should set the alarm bells ringing.
    - danw 18y ago
      It isn't relevant that they didn't use MPEG. What they build was a great platform to browse what content is available that can handle the enormous amount of traffic they receive. That wouldn't change if they offered the video in a different format.
      - gaius 18y ago
        Of course it would! Streaming their at all was a very poor technical decision. The very obvious technical and economic solution would be self-contained files shared over BitTorrent. This was and is a pointless waste on the scale of pets.com. The difference being it's not just sucker VCs money, it's every taxpayer's.
  - danw 18y ago
    Yes, the detail is a bit scant on this I'm afraid. I was lucky enough to attend the London Geek Dinner where they presented and asked question in greater depth about how they scale and why they made their decisions. As an aside, the head of iPlayer was CTO of Kazaa which I find an amusing turn of events

2 points by danw 18y ago

gaius 18y ago

Look, BBC, you haven't done anything clever here. The British taxpayer OWNS you. We own every programme in your archive, we're already paid for them. Rather than wasting time and money on this you should have made your entire catalogue available for download in an open format like MPEG. A proprietary, DRM-laden format on public property is an outrage.

handelaar 18y ago
The actual link, which this comment doesn't have any relevance to at all, describes (in rather too shallow detail for my taste) what the iPlayer's built with and how they scale the front end. The link's about code and development and deployment: Hacker News stuff. Your comment is about none of those things. Ranting that "you haven't done anything clever" because you don't like their streaming format? Please, I beg you, take it back to Slashdot.
- gaius 18y ago
  No, it is completely relevant. The BBC should not have spent taxpayer's money on any of this. Everything they needed to make the archive available for download in MPEG is freely available. Expending vast resources to solve a non-existant problem in an overly complicated manner is the exact opposite of the hacker/startup ethos. Not only that but this is the BBC publishing an article on how great the BBC is. That alone should set the alarm bells ringing.
  - danw 18y ago
    It isn't relevant that they didn't use MPEG. What they build was a great platform to browse what content is available that can handle the enormous amount of traffic they receive. That wouldn't change if they offered the video in a different format.
    - gaius 18y ago
      Of course it would! Streaming their at all was a very poor technical decision. The very obvious technical and economic solution would be self-contained files shared over BitTorrent. This was and is a pointless waste on the scale of pets.com. The difference being it's not just sucker VCs money, it's every taxpayer's.
- danw 18y ago
  Yes, the detail is a bit scant on this I'm afraid. I was lucky enough to attend the London Geek Dinner where they presented and asked question in greater depth about how they scale and why they made their decisions. As an aside, the head of iPlayer was CTO of Kazaa which I find an amusing turn of events