BBC iPlayer (No Vista) Bahhh | The Coffeehouse

Skriker V1.0
Need more money...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6913297.stm Just like channel4s 4OD on demand service the BBC have decided to go XP SP2 only, I remember seeing a demo by the BBC @ Mix06 showing off this stuff on Vista, wonder what happened Sad

Cant see any "Technical Reason" why it wont work on Vista.

Previous post on this:

http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=319938#319938

Lloyd_Humph
If Blackberrys are addictive cellphones, Channel9 is the ultimate addictive website.

It's stupid. It should be on Vista. This is the BBC. They make billions a year. They should easily be able to get it working on an extra operating system. It's pathetic.

yman

Lloyd_Humph wrote:

they make billions a year.

You mean the British tv license paying population pays them billions a year? (4 billions I think it is roughly)

geraintj

I got 4OD working on Vista by following this guy's instructions. If it's the same issue, it might work for iPlayer. Tell me if it does btw, and I'll download it!

Lloyd_Humph
If Blackberrys are addictive cellphones, Channel9 is the ultimate addictive website.

yman wrote:

Lloyd_Humph wrote:
they make billions a year.

You mean the British tv license paying population pays them billions a year? (4 billions I think it is roughly)

Yeah, even thats stupid. I appreciate that they have no adverts, that makes for a great evening of telly. Mock The Week is the only thing I watch on the BBC, sometimes Hyperdrive if I can be bothered. I know a person who pulled out all the BBC tuners in his TV but still had to pay the TV license. Thats just stupid Perplexed

yman

Lloyd_Humph wrote:

Yeah, even thats stupid.

I don't know. I think the BBC, generally, is an excellent institution. It provides relatively good content entertainment without advertisements. Go and live in america for a while you will see how you miss the BBC.

Saything that, I really do think the BBC needs to reform. I don't know about the UK niners here, but I think the BBC is biased. Not biased against any political parties, but biased against certain ideas as I believe they are left-leaning. The BBC should be impartial as most importantly their Royal Charter explictly states that they should be impartial. However, I know this is hard to put into practice considering it's humans in the end which run the BBC.

On the point about your friend, if you don't watch /any/ BBC content and you can prove it (hard to do as the inspectors will find it difficult to contemplate that the person in question doesn't watch any BBC content) you shouldn't have to pay for the license.

I'm proud to pay (well, I hope my parents are) the license fee as I know I am helping to finance a company which generally produces good-quality content. Saying that, I have read some damning reports claiming that the BBC will limit producing "high brow" entertainment as according to reports low earners don't watch as much of the BBC in respect to the higher earners. They claimed they will be producing more DoctorWho-style productions in favour of more perceived "high brow" productions like documantaries.
I hope the BBC won't forget their roots and simply get sucked-in to the never-ending spiral of rating-yielding reality television.

daSmirnov

Lloyd_Humph wrote:
Yeah, even thats stupid.

Some people like television to be in the public sector instead of the constant stream of crap private channels throw out. Second to the BBC is Channel 4, and that's only because its shareholder is the government. ITV, Sky, utter crap.

Lloyd_Humph
If Blackberrys are addictive cellphones, Channel9 is the ultimate addictive website.

Oh I must disagree. Unless you exclude Five in those "cr4p" channels.

Five has made some brilliant stuff lately, my favorite being Greys Anatomy and House. Many of the stuff they've put out has been truly brilliant. If I could choose a channel which my TV would be constantly on, it would definately be five. As to their stupid documentaries; "My Brilliant Brain" (what!?!?!) I don't care much for their pointlessness.

yman

Lloyd_Humph wrote:

Five

In my opinion:

Five == tacky american afternoon films Tongue Out

Rossj

Television?

Lloyd_Humph
If Blackberrys are addictive cellphones, Channel9 is the ultimate addictive website.

yman wrote:

Lloyd_Humph wrote:

Five

In my opinion:

Five == tacky american afternoon films

In the afternoon, yes.

My favs:

Shark
House
Greys Anatomy
Vanished
Prison Break*

*=The idiots sold it! The best TV show! I'm unable to get sky so I can no longer watch it.

Oh yeah, back on track: iPlayer people!! A wonderful idea, but they still could've put it on Vista. It wouldn't be difficult... I mean, what obstacles could they face? Most apps I've had work fine in Vista, apps intended for XP. I hope they just mean theres no support for Vista, not that it WONT WORK with Vista 100%.

GoddersUK
I CAN has cheezburger and you CAN'T has stop me!

Lloyd_Humph wrote:
I know a person who pulled out all the BBC tuners in his TV but still had to pay the TV license. Thats just stupid

Erm... Two points:

All the station transmit using EM waves, so a tuner that's capable of picking ITV1, Channel 4 or 5 up is capable of picking BBC up. And so is a sky or NTL box - the BBC send unencrypted channels via both of those services.

So what he did was impossible. And even if it wasn't:

The TV licenses isn't just for recieving BBC channels, it for the use of TV reception equipment full stop - whatever you use. It is in fact called (according to wikipedia) a " broadcast receiver licence."

And if you think that's mad it's apparently more or less impossible to convince them you don't own a TV, I've heard that they usualy believe that you've just hidden your TV in your neighbours house.

ScanIAm
On a scale of 1 to 10, people are stupid.

Rossj wrote:
Television?

Ahh!!! I forgot about that song!!!

Excellent

GoddersUK
I CAN has cheezburger and you CAN'T has stop me!

yman wrote:

biased against certain ideas as I believe they are left-leaning. The BBC should be impartial as most importantly their Royal Charter explictly states that they should be impartial. However, I know this is hard to put into practice considering it's humans in the end which run the BBC.

And what's wrong with a left wing bias?...

Just cancel it out by reading a (non tabloid) right leaning newspaper.

It's better than all the right wing crap on Sky and Fox News.

Shoot Rupert Murdoch, and burn down Newscorp.!

yman wrote:
On the point about your friend, if you don't watch /any/ BBC content and you can prove it (hard to do as the inspectors will find it difficult to contemplate that the person in question doesn't watch any BBC content) you shouldn't have to pay for the license.

See my above post - the licence isn't to watch the BBC it's to own TV reception equipment.

daSmirnov wrote:
Some people like television to be in the public sector instead of the constant stream of crap private channels throw out. Second to the BBC is Channel 4, and that's only because its shareholder is the government. ITV, Sky, utter crap.

I trust very few other news sources...

ITN,
Reuters

Are the only two I can think of right now that I trust (my memory's not always too good when it comes to lists... Tongue Out

)

Ray6

Lloyd_Humph wrote:
Oh I must disagree. Unless you exclude Five in those "cr4p" channels.Five has made some brilliant stuff lately, my favorite being Greys Anatomy and House. Many of the stuff they've put out has been truly brilliant. If I could choose a channel which my TV would be constantly on, it would definately be five. As to their stupid documentaries; "My Brilliant Brain" (what!?!?!) I don't care much for their pointlessness.

Any channel can buy the occasional gem; that's easy. The BBC actually has to MAKE stuff. Dramas like Jekyll do not make themselves. On top of that, they have to outbid the commercially sponsored channels if they want to get hold of stuff like 'Heroes'.Meanwhile, the real output of Channel 5 can be summed up as (I need to watch my language)s and/or Sharks.Having said that, the BBC is now being sucked into making less drama and more so-called 'reality tv'. I don't want reality tv. There is a reason that these people cannot get on TV by any other route; they have no talent. If I wanted to watch these people for hours on end then I would pitch a tent in Burger King. I was hoping that the recent tv-phone-in scandals would be a wake up call for the general public, but apparently not. My favourite quote from the ITV mess was:

interviewed moron wrote:
'I have spent thousands of pounds ringing in to win a prize, and now I find out that I might not have been entered in the competition. I feel such a fool.'

Mrs Ray6 heard a rumour that Lord Webber wants to launch a reality tv show, to find the lead in 'Jesus Christ Superstar'.I said this was unlikely because a show called 'Looking for Jesus' would be pretty offensive, to a sizeable chunk of the licensee fee paying public. And what happens when they vote off a Jesus reject at the end of the show? Do they nail him to a big neon cross then wheel him off stage, accompanied by looks of genuine sorrow from Graham Norton?Hmph! Sunday morning rant. Sorry 'bout that.

yman

GoddersUK wrote:

And what's wrong with a left wing bias?...

Just cancel it out by reading a (non tabloid) right leaning newspaper.

It's better than all the right wing crap on Sky and Fox News.

Shoot Rupert Murdoch, and burn down Newscorp.!

There's nothing wrong with left-wing bias if it's in a private newspaper for example. The difference is that the BBC is funded by the public and and their Charter states they should be impartial.

Indeed, I cringed when I first got Sky TV and watched Sky News and Fox News and CNN for the first time. Specially the vile Fox News.... "fair and balanced" debate, wtf? That's an oxymoron coming from them.

When compared to the some of the media in America (Fox for example) the BBC isn't bad really. Just on some issues they move to the left.

I do read The Times and The Telegraph ("The Torygraph" which W3bbo affectionately calls it). I can safely say I have never touched the xenophobic hate-spreading Daily Mail

yman

GoddersUK wrote:

See my above post - the licence isn't to watch the BBC it's to own TV reception equipment.

Ah, my apologies. I was misinformed Smiley

irascian
Irascible Ian

GoddersUK wrote:

I trust very few other news sources...

The days when the BBC could be trusted are long gone. You only have to look at the phone competition scandal (I mean "Blue Peter" of all things!) and the deliberate re-ordering of footage to give the misleading impression the Queen had thrown a strop last week to see how far they've fallen.

There was a post on the BackStage list that I think said the reason for non-Vista support was that they had based their player on a component that hadn't yet been made available for Vista (Kontiki?).

It does make you wonder why we, as tax payers, are funding all this R&D and jollies to Las Vegas to promote the ground-breaking innovation the BBC are undertaking with our money when so little seems to actually make it to market. What's really annoying about iPlayer is many months after the beta with the public announcement of "availability on July 27th" it's still effectively in beta (as indicated on the main page the announcement of release refers to) with access only being given in small numbers over the upcoming months. All-in-all it seems to be too little too late and while it would be nice to think that this is because the BBC are spending our money wisely, past evidence shows this is highly unlikely to be the case (don't get me started on the whole "Rome" fiasco where they spent millions of taxpayers money on a drama series, only to edit the first two episodes down into a single episode that made no sense and had the director publicly disowning it).

GoddersUK
I CAN has cheezburger and you CAN'T has stop me!

yman wrote:
There's nothing wrong with left-wing bias if it's in a private newspaper for example. The difference is that the BBC is funded by the public and and their Charter states they should be impartial.

It is as you said elsewhere in you post one of the most unbias new sources of all, so I don't know why people attack it all the time, nothing can be completly unbiased.

The only way for it to be made unbiased is to have programmes with a delibratly left wing bias, and an equal amount of programmes with a delibrately right wing bias.

But the BBC will always be slightly left leaning, it is a product of the left after all.

irascian wrote:
The days when the BBC could be trusted are long gone. You only have to look at the phone competition scandal (I mean "Blue Peter" of all things!) and the deliberate re-ordering of footage to give the misleading impression the Queen had thrown a strop last week to see how far they've fallen.

BBC news and Blue Peter and the documentary about the queen and so forth are all from different departments. And the queen thing was the fault of a 3rd party production company.

blowdart
Peek-a-boo

yman wrote:
The difference is that the BBC is funded by the public and and their Charter states they should be impartial.

The unique way the BBC is funded.

However everything is biased, be it concious or unconscious.

W3bbo
The Master of Baiters

irascian wrote:
The days when the BBC could be trusted are long gone. You only have to look at the phone competition scandal (I mean "Blue Peter" of all things!) and the deliberate re-ordering of footage to give the misleading impression the Queen had thrown a strop last week to see how far they've fallen.

To be fair, the Queen thing was by a third-party, a production company, not the BBC itself.

I've lost faith in the BBC because of Panorama. They should just stop it, it's just tabloid journalism in a suit.

Tensor
Im in yr house upgrading yr family

With regards to the original point - Personally I think that, if they have it ready for what is there biggest target platform (ie windows xp) then release it. Why wait? Should we wait until a version for every platform is finished?

A Vista, Mac and probably Linux version are all, as far as I understand it, in the pipeline. The BBC does not have infinite resources and cant finish all these at once.

plkrtn

I have to agree with the above post. This has been in development for 4 years now, and the BBC have been criticised for that, yet they are now being criticised that they are having a staged roll out, and it isn't available to all platforms yet, and on a closed beta. Could you imagine ISPs being in a good mood when the BBC announce "Yes, its free to everyone, get downloading our P2P app now!" millions would download it over the weekend, and the ISPs would be crippled by the sheer amount of traffic.

As for launching only on XP SP 2 at the moment... Well, they have to logically start with the biggest market don't they? Plus, to satisfy the makers of the content and the after broadcast market (such as DVD) they need to include DRM features, whether we like it or not, else this system just wouldn't be viable. Apple won't open FairPlay up to anybody unless they do it on Apple's terms (via iTunes and have a fee they can take a slice of) so the BBC need to look at other potential solutions for the Apple machines, which don't really exist. As for Linux, well, what can they do for that particular market? Microsoft I am sure are working alongside the BBC to take their WMV-DRM solutions to other platforms, but until they work it out there isn't much the BBC can do. Private market forces are stopping their public broadcasting remit, essentially.

The sad truth is, the BBC are by far the biggest broadcasting innovator in the UK, if not the world and have to take things stage by stage to eventually get it to the largest audience available. They are in a Catch 22 situation. Take the digital tv roll out in the UK for example. They were criticised for launching digital only channels and using the license fee toward it, but without launching digital only channels, what benefit would there have been to transfer to digital television?

Oh, and the license fee doesn't just pay for the BBC. It pays for a large part of Channel 4's public remit as well as the network of UK broadcast transmitters, and of course the BBC have been made responsible for paying for digital switchover, including giving pensioners free digital TV recievers, because they are too tight fisted to pay £15 for a box for themselves...

bobpullen

Skriker V1.0 wrote:

Cant see any "Technical Reason" why it wont work on Vista.

Hi there,

It will work on Vista. Check out this Digg article that links to a blog post I made earlier today:

http://digg.com/software/How_to_install_the_BBC_iPlayer_on_Windows_Vista

Rgds,

Bob

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