Re: [Fsfe-uk] BBC News partnership with Microsoft

[Jon Grant]

Hi!

[...]
> The BBC have got a media player for playing recently-broadcast
> programmes, but unfortunately because of the way the programmes are then
> passed over to BBC Worldwide to be "commercialised", the player is
> DRM'ed to the hilt and actively destroys downloaded media after 7 days,
> from what I've heard. I don't know which compression algorithms they're
> using in the player, it /could/ be Dirac...

Sadly it was using WMP, and it didn't seem to be p2p in the end either. They
did a deal with another company to provide the service, I forget which. The
time limit was apparently coded in local JavaScript BTW!

Re-Dirac, they only had reference implementations last time I looked,
and we need more than 2fps for it to be usable. They should re-write the
codec in optimal C and have an option for multi-threaded decode. The BBC
research guys said it was intended for HD content, so maybe something
post-FreeView in 2015 or so.. I speculate...

Cheers
Jon