More iPlayer shenanigans

I seem to be obsessed with fiddling with the BBC's iPlayer in one form or another. I admit it, I have a problem. From knocking together scripts to control the rubbish Windows downloading version (preventing it from raping my bandwidth and quietly moving the files as soon as they were downloaded through FairUse4WM so that I could play the resulting files on non-Windows machines) to being the first documented person to limbo past the mechanisms designed to favour iPhone and iPod Touch users over mere mortals, I've been picking at the edges of the stickers to see what's underneath them.

As I previously mentioned, the BBC were pushing out a Nokia N96 application for iPlayer access, and I wondered why they were restricting it to just that handset when there are plenty of other QVGA, Symbian S60v3 handsets. Well, it's out now and I'm still wondering why they're restricting it to the N96 because the application works perfectly well on the N95 – not that the average user would be able to find that out, because the iPlayer team have put access to the app behind a user agent checking script. Visit www.bbc.co.uk/mobile/iplayer on an N95 and you get told your phone isn't compatible, but get Firefox to pretend to be an N96 and you gain access to the application, stored at www.bbc.co.uk/mobile/iplayer/iplayer.wgz

WGZ files are Nokia widgets, and are actually renamed ZIP files chock full of webby things (HTML, JavaScript, images and CSS) assembled with a bit of metadata so that the phone knows what to do with it all. Looking at the code in the iPlayer app is a little tricky in its raw form because it's partly obfuscated (no line returns and variable names are deliberately non-descriptive) but also interesting (because sections refer to other Nokia handsets).

The quality of the streams that iPlayer provides the Nokia phones is significantly inferior to the iPhone version – but then there's a smaller, lower resolution screen. When you're actually watching them they're quite adequate.

Far more details are over at the Beebhack Wiki where like-minded brethren pick over the carcass of iPlayer's chicken: beebhack.wikia.com/wiki/Nokia_H.264_version

More newsworthy to some of us is that the next version of iPlayer will be an Adobe AIR application that will happily run on anything that AIR runs on (basically the big three – Windows, Mac and x86 Linux). Yay – DRM on a Linux box. Anyway, AIR apps are actually ZIP files chock full of webby things assembled with a bit of metadata so that… you get the idea. And with that, there's the possibility of more code to snoop around in.

I did a little w00t on Twitter, mainly because I like AIR (hey, I'm a Flash developer – of course I'm going to like it) and I know what's going on in the industry and how AIR works. But only a little w00t because I'm a fan of open source, and AIR is nothing like that, bringing, as it does, DRM to a nice, open OS like Linux. Anyway, the Beeb's internet blog lists it as a review of the announcement, which is kinda cool – not least because they link to this blog, which includes me describing the Windows-only, Kontiki-based iPlayer as a "foetid turd". Yay me =) (I've got an unpublished draft of a post sat looking at me at the moment describing it as "a foetid turd hanging from the sphincter of technology" which makes me smile each time I see it!)

So, erm, yeah. iPlayer.