Get back in your shell, you cirriped
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BBC shuts out open source software
THE BBC has enabled SWF Verification for its Iplayer streaming video service in a move that locks out users of open source software.
At the heart of the problem is Adobe which is not allowing its RTMP content protection measures to become open source. This makes it impossible to create a fully compatible open source RTMP client.
Thus an RTMP streaming video server that has SWF Verification enabled will terminate connections from clients that fail to supply an authorisation key. This is designed to prevent third-party software from downloading the video.
XBMC media centre users have been moaning on various online forums that the application can no longer be used to watch Iplayer content. The Totem BBC plugin, which was developed by the BBC itself in collaboration with Canonical and Collabora, is also broken.
It is not clear where this leaves the BBC, as it has indicated in the past that it will support open source software. µ
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just a note to say that in my previous post typo "imporable" was supposed to say "interoperable".
can we add that little tidbit of information to the main article?
As the H article points out, it’s very easy to get around this, simply by transparently reconnecting when the connection is dropped after 2 minutes. So it lets you stream for another 2 minutes before dropping you. So your client reconnects again. And again. And again.
So the user doesn’t notice any difference, but you end up putting something like 10x the load on the poor server. So who ends up suffering? Not the user.
I don't watch TV anyway and our little 14 inch CRT hasnt even been connected to an aerial since we lived in this flat but i am a fan of open and imporable systems. I didn't even know there was an rtmp plugin that can play iplayer content. However this move by the BBC clearly shows they have no interest in supporting my interests and as such my TV will shortly be going to the dump and I will not be paying another TV license fee.
@Jeff: The BBC provide a special h.264 service for the iPhone... That will be fine for the iPad!
Headline should read "BBC sticks with Microsoft."
Adobe is a member of Linux Foundation. That is why, Adobe will ban any unapproved players because Linux Foundation required its members to respect.