April 2009
32 posts
3 tags
Paint on a canvas
We don’t know a huge amount what Project Canvas—if it gets BBC Trust Approval—will entail.
What we do know is that the BBC is keen to build on existing standards where possible (and following the failure of Kangaroo at the market impact evaluation phase, this isn’t surprising), but that doesn’t mean they don’t have an agenda.
My predictions:—
Canvas will be built...
1 tag
Musing
I wonder if, when talking about sentences of the death penalty in the US, news outlets said “John Doe has been sentenced to be murdered by the state executioner” instead of “John Doe has been sentenced to death”, would it be more or less popular?
The phrase “sentenced to death” suggests that it will just happen, and that nobody (and no entity) is actually responsible for the act,...
3 tags
Flash vs the World
When it comes to video playback on the Mac, Flash is by no means king.
I didn’t realise quite how bad it was until the new iPlayer HD service launched.
It’s okay fullscreen, but hit Escape with the video still playing, and Flash does a really poor job of downscaling that 720p stream. Really bad.
Exhibit A: VLC downscaling a 1080p video. Note the CPU usage—it’s software...
3 tags
Posts like this really annoy me
I stumbled across this post on the BBC Internet blog.
This is what it should have said:
When we launched BBC HD, we didn’t have the infrastructure to enable the “Copy Control Information” on a per-programme basis, and so we had to enable it for everything. This meant that certain HD receivers wouldn’t allow content to be recorded, or displayed unless you had the right kind of...
4 tags
Drafting a secure RTP transport profile
Yes, I know SRTP exists, but it solves a rather different problem.
What I’m aiming at here is a protocol wherein the lifetime of the stream can exceed the lifetime of the key—that is, authenticated access to an ongoing stream.
My rough notes so far are that:—
In order to access the SDP for a stream, the client must authenticate itself to the server (WWW-Authenticate, quite probably?)
...
2 tags
Nanny state
Before we begin the fourth episode of Quatermass II, we’d like to say that in our opinion it is not suitable for children, or those of you who may have a nervous disposition
—BBC voice-over, 1955.
Some things never change, eh?
5 tags
Project Canvas
Yesterday, the first stage of consultation by the BBC Trust on Project Canvas closed. Unbeknownst to me, mind—the usual news outlets all carried news of it (back in December), but somehow I missed it.
Having read through the consultation document, a couple of things spring to mind:
If this is as open-ended as it claims to be, it will be exactly what I’ve been clamouring for. Essentially...
1 tag
Police State
When people accuse Britain of heading towards “a police state”, they mean something a little different to historical uses of the term. The western (at least) world has evolved, and so have methods being put to use. Drawing parallels doesn’t mean that two things are exactly the same.
When people (rightly) point out that, say, East Germany and Britain are worlds apart, all manner of angst is...
8 tags
Best-kept secrets
One thing I haven’t mentioned of late is Zattoo. Zattoo simulcasts TV, legally, over IP, using a variety of techniques (including peer-to-peer).
Zattoo is interesting on a few fronts: first, it’s another completely proprietary solution; second is the fact that I’m actually fine with this.
Why?
Because Zattoo is independent of the broadcasters themselves. Zattoo UK carries...
1 tag
Breaking the law is okay
…provided it’s not the laws in your country that you’re breaking.
Helping Chinese dissidents evade the Great Firewall of China? Absolutely fine.
Aiding women persecuted by fundamentalist Islamic regimes? Fight the good fight!
Standing up for your right to take photographs in the UK? Having the temerity to ask for the basis of the application of specific anti-terrorism powers by...
1 tag
IFPI vs The Pirate Bay
This wasn’t a small victory for the IFPI.
It was a victory so utterly miniscule that it’s practically microscopic.
The recording industry has, once again, lost far more than it gained.
1 tag
Why BT (and Digital Britain) is a ball of fail
Ian Livingstone, boss of BT:
2 mbits per second service would be good enough for the vast majority of current internet use.
Err, that’s great.
No, really, it is. I’m glad that BT is aiming so high as to accommodate the majority of current Internet use.
Cluebat: low-latency high-bandwidth access is a means, not an end; it opens up doors to new opportunities, markets and...
8 tags
Video streaming on open standards
I don’t particularly care for downloading the BBC’s TV programmes from illicit sources. I don’t even really care for downloading the BBC’s TV programmes from legitimate sources via unapproved means.
What I do care about is that the choices I make regarding which devices I can view that content on are not restricted by a single company, such as Adobe, or Apple, or...
5 tags
No answers, only questions
How many local newspaper outfits owned by Guardian Media Group went into administration recently?
How many of those were actually dying, as opposed to “not profitable enough to sustain GMG’s subsidy of the Guardian and the Observer”?
How many Guardian and Observer employees have penned articles about the death of local media?
Why, more to the point, did said employees not see fit to mention...
1 tag
Tabs vs. Spaces
(via @boredzo)
Related to the aforementioned link, the thing about tabs vs. spaces is this:
It depends entirely on what you use tabs and spaces for.
Personally, I use them pretty much entirely for indentation levels, rather than “making things line up”. For that reason, if I’m saving files, I’ll use tabs, and I’ll hope that others do the same, thus, if somebody reads a file...
6 tags
An open letter to public-service broadcasters and...
The Internet and public-service broadcasting have more in common than they differ. At their respective hearts, both are built upon the principles of open standards and consensus.
When television broadcasting was born in a meaningful way, the use of open standards—allowing anybody with compatible equipment, whomever the manufacturer, to receive transmissions—was critical to its success: platform...
5 tags
The (slightly) confusing part about multicasting
When unicasting with RTSP/RTP, the SDP for the stream contains the IP address of the server which sources the stream. The client issues issues a command via RTSP to set up the session and the server begins sending data to the client.
When multicasting, things work a little a differently. The multicast IP used is the destination address that the server will send the stream to on a continual...
1 tag
Ad agency types!
Hi there.
Do you work at (or better, run) an ad agency that produces TV or pre-roll cinema spots?
Are you working with 1080p HD content?
Would you mind some of it being used as part of a showreel in some upcoming technology demonstrations?
If the answer to these questions is “Yes”, “Yes”, and “I’d be up for that”—or something along those lines, at least—it’d be grand if you...
4 tags
Evolution of the Species
I started a new project recently: a fork of Apple’s Darwin Streaming Server (the ugly step-brother of the QuickTime Streaming Server that ships with Mac OS X Server).
The thing about DSS is that Apple has pretty much given up on trying to expend any efforts in keeping it portable; they ‘welcome’ patches for portability (i.e., people attach them to Trac tickets, and they may or may not appear in...
4 tags
Why ICANN is becoming irrelevant
I first noticed this on Orange’s “I am” radio ads last year, but it’s become increasingly more prevalent.
I still remember the first time I saw the URL on a TV advert (it was for Ford, incidentally, possibly the Mondeo). Now, we’re seeing the death of URLs—or more accurately, hostnames.
Instead of plastering “www.example.com” over an advert, it seems advertisers are instead writing...
4 tags
MPEG-2 Transport Streams and RTP
In my abridged glossary of MPEG video I mentioned that MPEG-2 Transport Streams were used as the basis of DVB broadcasting (amongst other things), and also that media players that ship with commercial operating systems (that is, QuickTime and Windows Media Player) don’t really support demuxing MPEG-2 TS transported over an IP network.
Despite this, wrapping up MPEG-2 TS packets...
5 tags
An abridged glossary of (MPEG) video
Container
A file containing one or more *tracks* of audio, video, or both (or conceivably, something else entirely). .avi, .mov, .mp4, .3gp, .mkv are all containers. Some containers make specific representations about what format of content they can contain (MPEG 4 and 3GPP), others by convention (i.e., .ogg containers generally contain Vorbis audio and Theora video, and not, say, AAC audio and...
4 tags
All you need is some sticky-backed plastic...
This is an exercise for the reader. Some of you might find it fun. Some of you won’t get it in the slightest. It’s just a suggestion as to what you can do, and hint at the sorts of things we should be seeing more of as provided services.
Use iplayer-dl to fetch the iPhone-targetted H.264/AAC version of a programme. Let’s say… b00jmx6y.
Fetch the metadata for this episode from...
4 tags
Darling on the recession
Chancellor Alistair Darling has admitted the Treasury got it wrong over the length and depth of the recession:
“The downturn since last autumn has been far deeper than people expected in any part of the world,” he told the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show.
…except all of the people who said he was talking rubbish in the first place, he presumably means.
4 tags
What price iPlayer DRM?
Content distributed via the BBC iPlayer is generally protected with DRM. Well, it’s actually not, it’s largely “protected” by the fact that Adobe hasn’t released the specifications for RTMP yet. There’s DRM protecting the MPEG4 content that you download to your computer with the iPlayer AIR application, though.
Why does iPlayer need DRM? To protect our (the license-fee...
4 tags
QuickTime X
I wonder, will QuickTime X finally bring about the death of the barely-used interactive authoring aspects of QuickTime?
What? You didn’t know you could do that stuff in QuickTime? Not surprising, really: most of the companies who produce authoring tools are either dead or dying. Run QuickTime Player, and choose Show Content Guide from the Window menu. See that? That’s a QuickTime...
5 tags
Television
The Internet is still in its infancy in terms of applications: new ones spring up every day. Some have been around for a long time, but we’re only recently starting to see them, thanks to bandwidth and latency constraints.
Television is open-ended, but joining the party is difficult because of a limit on the total available bandwidth for a given medium. Whether it’s terrestrial, cable or...
4 tags
European Court of Human Rights
From the BBC:
Lord Hoffmann, the second most senior Law Lord, said the Strasbourg court had imposed “uniform rules” on states.
The judge said rulings that had gone against domestic decisions were “teaching grandmothers to suck eggs”.
Listen, fucko:
“Teaching grandmothers to suck eggs” refers to attempting to tell somebody how to do something they are already...
3 tags
The Internet routes around problems
People often say “the Internet routes around problems”. This harks back to the days when the precursor to the Internet was designed to be resilient against attacks through the use of redundancy.
It’s still true, to an extent, though depending upon where in the cycle we are, you might notice the strain being put on particular pipes because two routes from A to B have been reduced to one.
...
5 tags
ICANN
ICANN is quite a bizarre outfit. It has–by the standards of most people—huge sums of cash to play with, handed over pretty much for no reason at all.
You see, ICANN (mostly) has authority over the root zone. This is the place that DNS servers all over the world look at first when they don’t know the answer to a query themselves: they start at the root zone, and work down (so, if...
3 tags
Iowa
Iowa’s Supreme Court says:
The court, citing historical
as well as present-day examples, concluded that gay and lesbian people as a
group have long been the victim of purposeful and invidious discrimination
because of their sexual orientation. There was no evidence that the
characteristic that defines the members of this group—sexual orientation—bears
any logical relationship to...
5 tags
Shane Richmond on Google News
Shane Richmond over at the Telegraph has penned a wonderfully-common-sense piece on why the Guardian’s stance is pretty flawed.
The Guardian’s line was essentially that Google News is killing them, because they’re not making enough money from the adverts served on the pages people arrive at via Google News in order to sustain publishing the content online for free. Not only that, but they don’t...