Andy wrote:
On 04/01/2008, Phil Wilson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
You don't need the iPlayer source. All of the heavy lifting on the client is
done by Flash
itself.
Flash is somewhat inefficient as it's adding an extra layer in the way
of the hardware.
It is also prohibited to use the Adobe Flash Web Player on anything
that isn't a PC so how can the "heavy lifting" be done by Flash if
Flash is prohibited?
Also I thought Flash was only streaming, what if someone wanted to
build a download engine? Some people don't like leaving there PC on
all the time. Why not put download on an always on device?
You may want your router to actually do the downloading. Or if you
have some kind of NAS you may want it to do the fetching as it has
closer control of discs and is always on. In that case you don't even
want the playback components so all that's needed is the transfer. No
DRM rubbish as that's on the machine that does playback. But again the
BBC won't let us do this it would appear.
This may seem far fetched but if you have a couple of home PCs and
maybe a Media Centre or Set top box would you not benefit from having
one centralised download unit instead of duplicating the download and
storage to each device?
Apart form the BBCs "we hate people knowing how this works" attitude I
see no reason why it can't be done. After all the DRM isn't needed
here as you only need to know about DRM to actually play the file.
Downloading involves grabbing files, you need know nothing about them,
just what the transfer protocol is. So BBC what *is* the transfer
protocol for the downloads?
iPlayer delivers a standard FLV over a standard RTMP stream. These are not
"open"
protocols but they are quite well understood.
URLs of the actual docs would be good. I don't know of anything
capable of playing iPlayers Flash stream apart from Adobe Flash Player
which as mentioned can't be run on anything that's not a PC.
Gnash by the FSF is a good place to start.
Also do we have a way of getting the URLs of the stream and program
information without the need for "screen scraping"*. Some weird and
wonderful devices may not want to display the information the way the
BBC designed it. Webpages are nice for desktop PCs but some devices
have different UI capabilities.
Please read through the thread of the xbox media centre forum, or check
out Phil Wilson's post about this -
http://philwilson.org/blog/2007/12/downloading-from-the-bbc-streaming-iplayer-is-hard
For all you know someone may want to design a toaster that projects
the programme on the wall if someone asks it to play a certain
programme via voice command. Having to look at a webpage and say
"right right right, down, click" is a lot less intuitive than "play
Have I Got News For You". Yes this may seem a little unrealistic but
why do the BBC want to limit the scope of creativity?
The BBC never want's to "limit the scope of creativity."
We do hope to have a API in the future but right now, you can get XML
out of the normal site (as Phil found out). If we really wanted to limit
your creativity we wouldn't create XML files and stick them on the
public servers :)
If anyone wants to implement a downloader for some kind of NAS or
server, or router then it would be interesting to see (once the BBC
hands over what's needed).
You could do this now if you like, there are already applications which
rip streams.
iPlayer on a toaster would be fun for the pure novelty value but I'm
not sure if the voice recognition stuff is anywhere near good enough
yet for my suggestion. Might be able to find some other kind of UI
that would work, any suggestions?
Andy if you can make it happen, I will personally pay for you to come to
the BBC and demo it in front of the iplayer team. Even if you use
something like a Nabaztag to navigate through BBC iplayer radio content
that would be cool!
* I am almost certain this was mentioned at some point, but I can't
for the life of me think where.
The point is that with some collaboration and knowledge its almost
possible to build a iplayer for another device without breaking any of
the fundamental stuff I talked about before. This isn't the end of the
road, but we would love to speak to people hacking iplayer on to xboxs,
mobile phones, appletv, smart devices, etc... Who knows maybe there
might be one thing we could do our end which makes your life easier.
Ian
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