BBC joins war against Flash, launches beta HTML5 iPlayer It may not be the definitive decision which propels humanity towards our inevitable end, but in a post on the Beeb's internet blog, James East, the Media Playout Product Manager, stated that his team is now confident they can "achieve the playback quality you'd expect from the BBC without using a third-party plugin." HTML5 has …
Agreed. Finally.
I'll be very happy when I can use the BBC's websites using something other than a security hole propagation system.
I've had flash uninstalled for my main PC for a few years now and, partly thanks to initially Apple then others, there are steadily less and less websites that rely on Flash.
"...I've had flash uninstalled for my main PC for a few years now and, partly thanks to initially Apple then others, there are steadily less and less websites that rely on Flash.."
Same here. Must be going on for 5 years now. And I can't say I've missed it.
"...the BBC is one of the few places I have to right click and run flash player nowadays..."
It was always possible to access quite a lot of iPlayer stuff on your desktop comp anyway, by the simple expedient of changing the 'UserAgent' settings in your browser to self-identify as an iPad. This just makes it more straightforward.
I'll be very happy when I can use the BBC's websites using something other than a security hole propagation system.
And what makes you think that the various media players used by the browsers aren't full of different holes? Any good player will try and offload the decoding to the GPU and this means that privilege escalation is always possible.
And what makes you think that the various media players used by the browsers aren't full of different holes? Any good player will try and offload the decoding to the GPU and this means that privilege escalation is always possible.
There's no guarantee, of course, however the surface of attack is considerably smaller and rather importantly doesn't involve Adobe. When a plugin, e.g. one initially designed to provide nothing more than a simple augmentation of a website but extended mercilessly and thoughtlessly, has access to the entire client system and particularly when Adobe is involved any problem is much more likely to be serious compared to what's likely through a "simple" (hahaha) video decoder.
The linked page says that it supports Firefox 41 on Windows and Mac OS, I'm browsing with Firefox 41 on Ubuntu 14.04 and get this message:
"Will the beta work on my device?
Sorry, we can't provide you with the HTML5 Player beta because your browser doesn't support Media Source Extensions. "
So what's the difference between the same version of Firefox on these platforms? Me not understand :(
Me too. Firefox 41.0 on Kubuntu 14.04 doesn't work, but Google Chrome on the same platform works flawlessly with the HTML5 beta iPlayer. According to Wikipedia, Firefox is lacking MSE support at all, so I'm not clear how Firefox/Windows can work, and I don't have a test platform for it.
"...Years forward, hows yours doing? A score of 555 tells us you made it to the future..."
Score | Browser
526 | Chrome 44
525 | Opera 31
467 | Firefox 40
402 | Edge
396 | Safari 8.0
Confirming my personal experience that [Google-taint aside], Chrome has now unseated Firefox as the browser of choice for when you want most stuff 'just to work'©
Chrome has now unseated Firefox as the browser of choice for when you want most stuff 'just to work'©
I guess that 'just to work'© means not giving a toss about privacy or the rise of another browser monopoly and the evil that comes with it. Still, it's a free world, for now.
If Chrome has everything that FF does, then you'd be right, but developers work on different items at different rates. I know that currently, for example, Chrome is missing some of Firefox's features when it comes to displaying SVG 2.
Obviously, a higher score is better, but it doesn't help me if the browser doesn't have an HTML 5 feature that I need.
Do we know how the scores compare when it comes to covering features that deliver BBC content?
Does this mean we'll finally be able to have a player that can determine you're on the connection to support a HD stream, rather than default to SD and make you refresh the page to use HD? Not like most video sites have had on-the-fly resolution changing for donkeys years (and auto detection of bandwidth etc is also commonplace).
Have noticed they've brought back some of the 'classic' BBC2 intros, like the remote control car '2'. BBC gets big points for that, for nostalgia if nothing else.
Can someone suggest a user agent string that gets past the BBC gatekeeper? I've just tried several, and while it seems to be what the code is using to decide, all have been refused.
Wait, I'll pretend to be an iPad...
[EDIT] Yes, Safari 8 on iOS 8 was accepted to opt in. Now to see if it works (Firefox 38 on Linux really.)
[EDIT2] No. Even with mediasource toggled in about:config.
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:41.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/41.0
I crafted this one for my Firefox 41 on Kubuntu and it gets me past the gatekeeper, so that when I select an iPlayer stream I get the 'HTML5 beta' banner, but unfortunately the content does not play. I have fiddled with the media.* settings related to mp4 in about:config, enabling everything in sight, and have set media.mediasource.whitelist to FALSE, but no joy.
It's not a big deal; Chrome works fine, and if FF 42 has the fix, I can wait.
get_iplayer pretends to be a flash player using rtmpdump. If you read the blog article on the BBC website then you will see they intend to still serve to flash based devices for a few years yet. What happens then is another matter of course. Hopefully get_iplayer will be able to switch to HTML5 before then.
I don't think get_iplayer pretends to be an iPhone, as far as I'm aware it just tricks the BBCs servers into thinking their flash player is requesting the data. There was a very similar app that pretended to be an iPhone for the same purpose but that only downloaded SD versions of programs.
Edit: Jabuzz beat me to it by seconds! :D
"Flash is Trash" has been the slogan of many for 10 years yet Auntie desperately clinged onto the Ebola Virus of animation. One would have to think Auntie had a sweetheart deal with the vendor or something, the way they've clinged onto clunker technology.
Then it was, *gasp*, Air which was like a root canal done via your back passage with no nitrous oxide. Flaky, bug ridden, constantly crashing bag of bits.
Auntie needs to have a lot of their Techies sacked and get Standards knowledgeable programmers onboard before the firm is so irrelevant.
It's comments like this that show the complete (or perhaps willful) lack of understanding about the state of HTML5 video.
Despite the hyperbole, HTML5 video implementations and support still vary wildly between browsers and OS, particularly when it comes to DRM: just look at the number of comments here referencing hidden settings and developer flags.
iOS got HTML5 video first because it requires HLS, a format that only has half-arsed support on Android and almost no support at all on desktop browsers.
A Flash free world is coming, but until all major browsers finally implement a standard platform for encrypted video which is enabled by default, media companies will be forced to continue using Flash to fill the gaps.
If all the effort that went into publicly hating Flash went into lobbying browser developers, maybe we'd get there sooner.
If BBC would have gotten behind HTML5 properly, it could easily have helped propelling development of the HTML5 OPEN STANDARD forward at a high rate. Instead they couldn't be bothered and kept hanging on to the obsolete security nightmare that is the PROPRIETARY Flash.
Did you choose a picture of Pacific Quay because it is emblematic of people switching off BBC completely? Up here in Scotland we don't like being lied to and Aunty Scot has been doing it for years.
Occasionally someone in CyberNatSpace will put up an egregious example sampled and I suppose if that starts off in HTML5 it is likely to stay there, so good from that p.o.v. But I don't expect to otherwise make use of it.
I used to be a fan of and defender of public service broadcasting BBC style. Then the Scottish referendum happened and we saw it in full on propaganda mode treating 45% of us as extremists and being as biased as hell. So to hell with Aunty, a pox on her and ALL her Great British crap.
BTW you need a CyberNat icon to warn the more delicate denizens of Englandshire so they can dutifully ignore me.
The one thing that's certain with Flash Player is that it's always in need of an update, before it could possibly be used in a "safe" manner. And why not force a browser restart while we are at it. The modern day version of "reboot your system, just because we don't know what we are doing as programmers".
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