BBC iPlayer

Existing thread seems to be archived.

http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/broadcasting/a77809/bbc-adopts-flash-for-iplayer-web-video.html


Now, it doesn't make it clear whether the iPlayer is switching to Flash or will be running Flash videos in addition to the current offering, but if it's the former the value of the iPlayer has just gone down.


Why should 90% of users have to suffer the **** quality of flash videos just to keep the other 10% happy?

Flash videos are not crap quality if they are encoded properly. YouTube is not a great example to judge Flash video quality as they are heavily compressed on that. I'd expect the BBC iPlayer to encode their videos at a lot better quality. I've encoded videos in Flash and they look fantastic.

Press release from BBC:
"BBC enters strategic relationship with Adobe to enhance accessibility of BBC iPlayer and bbc.co.uk"
http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2007/10_october/16/adobe.shtml

EDIT: I noticed a new media player in development on Adobe's lab...
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/mediaplayer/
...I guess the iPlayer will use their new media player.

Hopefully it will be optional. Mac users can have the option to use Flash if they want, while the majority of us will be able to choose to watch on WMP.

On the issues of 'platform neutrality', for the last four or five months I've been unable to watch BBC videos in WMP. The BBC One idents section for example, will only let me watch in Real Player and if I select Windows Media Player, it still goes ahead and plays in Real Player, which in my opinion is a sub-standard, inferior piece of software. This isn't a problem with my computer, I'm having this problem at college too so it's obviously an issue at the BBC's end and dispite me complaining several times they've done nothing to fix it.

I was getting juddery videos (and not for the lack of CODECs on my machine) and recently clicking through to the IE webpage crashed my machine.

I've given up on it.

Does this mean an end to that horrid Kontiki?

I sincerely hope it's true. I'm pretty sure that that horrible Kintoki was what eventually killed my PC.

This opens up a whole can of worms, actually. For one thing, it's not really possible to enforce their DRM using Flash, is it: you can simply download the FLV files.

I tried to sign up and use it, but it told me Vista wasn't supported. *sigh* just 'cos the BBC are years out of date!

weren't adobe investigating a container format with DRM in it?