Way back in 2010, Paul Battley was blogging about device discrimination on the Internet. The new iPlayer service was using TLS certificates to ensure that only specific devices were able to stream media from the BBC's servers. That's a situation which continues over a decade later. If you watch iPlayer on your laptop, you're stuck with 720p quality. If you want 1080p and above, you need a specially certified device. Well, that's what everyone thought! A few weeks ago, I found this curious…
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Technology never works right. And video technology never works right even harder. The Amazon 4K Fire Stick is a pretty cool bit of kit. It's an Android device which can push 4K HDR video with surround sound to your TV. But, like any technology, it's buggy. Here's the bug report I've tried to send to Amazon and the BBC. They haven't answered - so I'm publishing it here as well. BBC iPlayer supplies 4K video - but the app doesn't switch to 4K mode, it stays at 1080p. Amazon debug To turn on…
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I loved the latest episode of Doctor Who. What made it even better was the fantastic use of 3D. It had just enough "wow" moments to make the use of technology worthwhile - without totally overdoing it. I watched the episode live at home on my Panasonic TX-L37ET5B. After the broadcast, I wanted to watch it again. That's where the problems started. First, a quick lesson on how 3D TV broadcasts work. Generally speaking, most 3D TV is Half-Side-By-Side. That means the left and right image…
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Two years ago, a bunch of smart people told the BBC that its plans to build iPlayer for Android on Adobe Flash was nuts. We argued loudly, passionately, deployed logic and reason, and provided specific technical details. Naturally, we were ignored. Sure, Flash was only on a few high end devices now, but the BBC were confident that Flash would be soon be available on all Android devices and our perceived problems would evaporate. Naturally, reality decided to ignore their wishful thinking. …
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I'm a huge fan of Paul Battley's iplayer-dl. In brief, it downloads videos from iPlayer by pretending to be an iPhone. The .MP4 files it grabs are suitable for playback on most mobile devices (480 x 272 and stereo audio). It also downloads radio programmes as .MP3 files. I was having a bit of trouble installing it on my XNAS - running Xebian Linux, so I've written this as an aide-mémoire. I hope you find it useful. Install Ruby and Ruby Gems apt-get install ruby rubygems Download and …
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