Andy Smith

iPlayer Desktop Launch

Andy — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 21:38:05 +0000

A big day for the iPlayer team today - a shiny new look for CBBC, local radio and the unveiling of our new cross-platform application : the iPlayer Desktop. With a commitment to a launch this year the client and server teams with help from Adobe have been working very hard to make this happen. As Andrew mentions this included tweaks for Air 1.5 which only came out of beta today.

I was going to post a ’sign up for labs then look for Buzzcocks’ guide’ for those having difficulties but looks like James has this covered.

There are a growing number of downloads available now - expect a full set in next couple of days. We’ll also look at some higher quality options next year (the download is currently the same as the h.264 stream)

Like any beta we’ll be pouring over your feedback in all the usual places (twitter, message boards and feedback forms) - expect to see Dan here - (he’s kindly volunteered to be our new Media Playout rep.) - or me during the night.

As well as being cross-platform - the Air platform gives us an easy way of delivering updates (fixes and new features) - we have some great things planned for next year.

JUST IN : check out our first video review and guide for Ubuntu 8.10

iPlayer Labs goes live

Andy — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 01:12:53 +0000

At one of the BeeBCamp sessions earlier this week we discussed the ‘labs’ idea as a way of delivering a kind of beta.bbc.co.uk, for early adopters and the curious, but with a more explicit opt-in.

So I’m pleased to see that iPlayer Labs has just gone live. The first features out of the door you might want to give feedback on are a new recommendations system, and dynamic sizing of the embedded media player.

Artist’s impression of a resizable video player

BeeBCamp

Andy — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 23:05:57 +0000

Morning Sessions - I picked the tricky ‘just before lunch’ slot.
. photo: Roo Reynolds

I was at BeeBCamp (an internal unconference) earlier this week. I took part in discussions on ’should we have a beta.bbc.co.uk’, learned about BBC Worldwide’s experience with syndication widgets and APIs, and heard the secrets of the BBC Internet Blog’s success from Jem Stone (more sessions and write-ups from : Roo, Phillip, Dan, Tom, Rain and Jason).

I brought a slightly-too-technical slant to the proceedings with my big list of tools and technologies the Media Playout group can’t live without :

Firebug is an indispensable debugging plugin for Firefox. We use it to check REST service calls, that far-future expires headers are being set and for stepping through JavaScript interactions - for example the call which updates your iPlayer last played list.
Greasemonkey (another plugin for Firefox) lets you use simple scripts to alter HTML pages. We use this to swap out the current embedded media player with a pre-release candidate across a selection of 100’s of live sites to check that a new release will work as expected.
Eggplant does for Flash what Selenium can do for HTML - an automated functional tester obediently clicking through some of the hundreds of thousands of possible permutations of the player overnight, using VNC to remotely connect to different operating systems, and using image and character matching to alert the team to anything that has gone astray.
RelaxNG is an elegant schema language for describing XML - especially useful for sharing the media playlist format. The compact syntax also lends itself to illustrating specifications (as seen in the Atom Feed specification)
ffmpeg is the Swiss Army knife of video transcoding. We used this to try out a variety of bitrates and dimensions to optimise iPlayer for Wii.
Charles Proxy often picks up traffic which is missed by Firebug. It also allows throttling to test low bandwidth situations.
FLV MetaData Viewer (also FLMDI, VLC and FLVPlayer) - Occasionally we find content that hasn’t been encoded correctly - all these tools help view or fix metadata in Flash video.
PHP - coming to the BBC’s live sites soon as part of a tech refresh - the development group all use local Apache instances running a variety of tools and test harnesses
Prince XML - turns ordinary XHTML and CSS into beautiful PDF documents and includes advanced typesetting options previously available only in tools like LaTeX.
SWF Intruder - We’re always on the look out for security vulnerabilities - this tool tries tests for a number of known cross-site issues. (See also Simon Willison great presentation to the conference last week : Web security horror stories)

EMP at the Olympics

Andy — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 13:23:36 +0000

For the first time we have the embedded media player (showing the Olympics opening ceremony) across all the main BBC homepages…

… and a record number of live streams being served.

I’ve also just found a fortune cookie (as part of a themed launch) containing the message ‘our mobile audience is heavily skewed towards the young and C2DE’s - and is much younger than our web audience’ - Is this good luck?

iPlayer 2.0

Andy — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 16:35:35 +0000

In order to see this content you need to have both Javascript enabled and Flash installed. Visit BBC Webwise for full instructions

We’ve pushed the button - the new site is now live - read more about it on the BBC Internet Blog

iPlayer - under the hood

Andy — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 08:28:15 +0000

Hello - I’ll be talking at Mashed 08 about some of the new technologies behind the latest iPlayer site which launches soon.

I’ve turned over my dormant blog to a selection of links, examples and feeds below - I hope you find these useful - I’ll be adding more on embedding video later this morning - but if you’re at Alexandra Palace I’m happy to help with anything you’re planning to make and will be around all weekend.

We’d particularly like to get feedback on some of the Atom formats we’re planning to use for iPlayer.

iPlayer Atom Feeds

Andy — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 01:05:17 +0000

Live Feeds

Sample Feed (forthcoming site)

Most Popular

iPlayer & EMP Hacks

Andy — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 22:46:51 +0000

iPlayer Lightbox - all available content in one big page of thumbnails
BBC News Channel Yahoo! Widget - get the runtime - then run news_channel.widget
iPlayer List - A stripped down screen-scraped view of iPlayer with added YouTube
WiiPlayer - A custom interface optimised for the Nintendo Wii
Facebook iPlayer Application - including new similarity feature
iPlayer Radio Google Gadget
Watchification Internet veterans curate the best online telly

iPlayer under the hood : related links

Andy — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 23:09:48 +0000

/programmes - A great source of XML, JSON and YAML data
BBC Radio Player - Happy Birthday / RIP - Nostlgia from Dan Taylor
BBC Internet Blog : iPlayer
My iPlayer and EMP bookmarks
From Barley To Barlesque - Mat Hampson writes about implementing the new visual language for BBC websites
Downloading Top Gear Legally: Why I Joined the BBC - iPlayer’s Anthony Rose talks fast cars and DRM (video)

Embedded Media on bbc.co.uk

Andy — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 00:13:49 +0000

A selection of sites using the new Embedded Media Player :

Andy Smith

iPlayer Desktop Launch

iPlayer Labs goes live

BeeBCamp

EMP at the Olympics

iPlayer 2.0

iPlayer - under the hood

iPlayer Atom Feeds

Live Feeds

Sample Feed (forthcoming site)

iPlayer & EMP Hacks

iPlayer under the hood : related links

Embedded Media on bbc.co.uk

July 2008

June 2008

May 2008

April 2008

March 2008

February 2008