Technorama

Like everyone else in the UK who watches TV, I've been funding BBC iPlayer (and also Creative Archive "initiative") sine 2003, I've still yet to see any accessible version of the iPlayer product available though.

If you have a Freeview decoder you will know the streams are all transmitted over the airwaves in MPEG2 format, with no Digital Restrictions Management impeding the accessibility of the content. BBC iPlayer streams content, post-broadcast, and because of this they argue they need Digital Restrictions to convince rights holders to let them stream -- it is a shame the BBC argeed to this strategy.

What I'd at least like to see now is an iPlayer box, like I have a Freeview and Freesat box (well and our Panasonic TX37LZD81 includes both Freesat HD and Freeview). At roughly the same price point as a router box (£40), just needs the BBC to freely licence iPlayer so vendors can bring to market open iPlayer boxes for us to connect to our TVs ;)

Labels: BBC, iPlayer, UK

A lot of websites do rely on the Adobe Flash Plugin to provide Video playback. Fortunately now that isn't necessary as we have the Theora codec. Theora is a completely free codec, no costly MPEG-LA patent licenses, or even software licences, it is all free, it's also available at no-cost online -- which is all great! As I've noted before, availability is worthless if it is not accessible, so distributing videos in Theora content is the future ;)

So skip the harmful tags (embed and object) that youTube try get you to use, display an frame of your video, with a play icon instead. Make it an onclick= action, to change the play icon colour. Then make that link to the Theora Ogg file. Something like Amazon are doing:
Install the codecs now, and be part of the future: Mac QuickTime, Windows DirectShow, Windows command line.

Example ffmpeg2theora command-line:

$ ffmpeg2theora -a 8 - v 8 my_input_video.mp4 --title "Documentary title" -o output_video_theora.ogg

It's a shame people like Cory Doctorow and Larry Lessig are still shoring up Adobe's proprietary Flash format by embedding in into their otherwise open web pages. At least when I pointed out that EFF was shoring up the proprietary WMV format, they fixed it..

A few other links on this topic, w3c video consultation, and the why video tag won't work (apparently!).

Labels: Theora

The problem of companies sending out HTML emails is getting worse, certainly in the UK I just received my TV License email, and the email only said "Your TV Licence is available". I needed to switch Thunderbird to view the message body as HTML to be able to get to the rest of the information. (Thunderbird Message Body naming isn't ideal either).

The automated email from TV Licensing now also uses a from address indicating they don't even want me to contact them, donotreply@tvlicensing.co.uk, their sender address bounces@tv-l.co.uk actually bounces when I tried to reply to them. Visit the TV Licensing site and you're presented with this link "Click here to fill in a short email form", a contradiction as the web-form is worse than usual, a tiny box which they try to give an automated answer, shifting yet more cost saving on to my back when I only wanted to let them know they were sending out empty emails.

Most spam I get uses HTML tricks to get through my ISP filters, a good reason if any not to support HTML email. HTML email is useful for sending tables of information, but then we could all just attach the OpenOffice file to the email!

Labels: TV, UK