S01E10 - Easy Come, Easy Go - 16/07/2008

Topics

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DWWelcome to the Ubuntu UK Podcast. This is episode 10. You're greeted here by me Daviey,

TWI'm Tony

API'm Alan

CDAnd I'm me

TWSo we made it to double figures guys.

APO' my life. We could be really geeky and say it's episode 2 in binary

DWNo, no we're not going to do that, but what I will say is that Ciemon bought us a celebration cake.

CDYeah, more cake

TWYeah, photo on the website. What's coming up on the show today?

APWe've got the competition results for giving away another Canonical store voucher

CDAnd we've got a new competition where we are going to give away the Efficent PC that we reviewed on our last podcast.

TWWe're going to talk about how you can watch a video on Linux.

CDWe're going to talk about the great work that is going on with the transcriptions of the podcast.

DWWe've also got a discussion on ignoring freedom aspect of selling Ubuntu.

TWAnd we've got some feedback

CDAnd some news

DWSounds like a fun packed show.

CDIt is!

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Watching Video on Linux

TWWe talked on a previous episode about using mythtv to record and watch TV specifically kind of freeview or satellite..

AP..broadcast..

TW..yeh, broadcast TV over the air, but it seems to me there has been a huge increase in online delivery of television programs, and that you can now get basically any telvision program legitimately from the broadcaster, at least here in the UK. Does that sound resonable?

APSome of them have services, yeah, that make it available online, but it's not all available on Linux unfortunately.

TWOK, so examples, I mean the big one in the UK is the BBC and there's two other, large, the largest channels, ITV and Channel 4.

APYeah and Channel 5 actually have some of their stuff online as well.

DWYeah, but who watches stuff on Channel 5?

APCSI

DWOh I guess Neighbours is on there now.

APAhh well, there you go you see.

TWBut all of these systems are DRM encumbered aren't they?

APWell, yes and no. The BBC iPlayer, one of the problems with the BBC iPlayer is it's actually multiple products branded as one thing. So there's the version of iPlayer that is natively to run on Windows and it uses Kontiki peer-to-peer software to share and download at the same time, and that runs on Windows and it uses Windows-based DRM, digital rights management or if you're Richard Stallman, digital restrictions management.

TWTo stop you copying it and uploading it somewhere else.

DWBut also, so you cant watch after a certain date as well.

APYeah, yeah because they want you to only watch it up to 30 days or something isn't it? Something like that.

TWIt's on windows

APSo we have no idea, no concept.But that is one of their products but there is a second one which is the flash player so if you've got a modern version of flash on your PC; Mac or Linux PC. You can go to thier website, http://bbc.co.uk/iplayer and you can just click play and watch a TV in the flash player embedded in your browser

DWBut on Flash player 9.0 and above you can actually make it full screen, can't you?

APYou can. I have kind of mixed results with that. Sometimes it plays full screen fine, sometimes it plays it a bit choppy. It's not as smooth as Tv of course.But you mileage may vary.There is a third way, if you've got an iPhone, an Apple iPhone; one brand, one model of mobile phone. You can point that at the iplayer website and it will deliver quicktime movies, because the Apple iPhone doesn't have flash built in, it doesn't use flash, it actually delivers a hole '.mov' file that you can play on the iPhone. Which is kind of annoying because they are delievering that content directly to one platform, the iPhone, but not to anyone else. We can play '.mov' files on Linux using VLC or whatever media player