The recent comments from SCE firmware engineers regarding the Flash implementation has given me a nudge to look into H.264 support a bit more. They say it should work, adding &fmt=6 to YouTube “watch” URLs says it should work; yet for the life of me I can’t get the BBC’s H.264 streams to play. The very same Flash player shows the videos in their high-quality glory on a PC, but on a PS3 it just hit with a NetStream.Play.Stop event (as mentioned before, the same behaviour you get on pre 9.0.115 versions of Flash on the PC when trying to play H.264 streams).
Taking an educated guess at the cause, if my experience of trying to get the iPlayer’s H.264 videos for the iPhone to play on the PS3 is anything to go by, it may be down to the H.264 streams being muxed into a MOV container and not an ISO-MPEG4 container (MP4); the PS3 will not play the former.
I am not certain how Flash Media Server operates, if it sends all the metadata from the source video file, or just specific parts, but there are certain “atoms” within an MOV file that prevents the PS3 from playing the video. It is trivial to remove them and replace them with ISO-MPEG4 equivalents, but if they make it through Flash Media Server and the RTMP stream, they may be what’s causing the problems.
P.S. Sorry for the downtime today – the BBC deployed some changes to make their fancy javascript-based widgets work over HTTPS and it threw things a little out of whack.
PS3 Firmware 2.52 out. I wonder if any Flash video things have been tweaked?
PS3 firmware 2.53 coming tommorrow with Fullscreen Flash support (woo…..) I really hope this means we can get a fullscreen iPlayer, using H.264 high quality streams…
Hi Mark,
Yep – just read about that. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that a few other tweaks have been included, as a firmware release just for full-screen flash support seems a little surprising (unless Sony has plans to use it for an unannounced project/partnership).
I’m not sure if H264 will be fixed as I still think it’s a compatability problem specific to the BBC’s streams (probably why the Beeb hasn’t announced that their BigScreen interface is officially supported on the PS3 yet.)
It will be interesting to see what controls are available to developers using full-screen mode. Keyboard input is disabled in full-screen mode on the PC (to prevent people displaying fake login prompts) – but disabling controller input (the D-pad mimics keypress events) would severely limit what could be done on the PS3. I see no reason for blocking it on the PS3 as hitting R3 to zoom gives the same effect.
Oddly enough the BBC’s “where to get BBC iPlayer” page (http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/where_to_get_iplayer/) now lists PS3 as being officially supported. It doesn’t work, however – the javascript error remains.
Good spot, thanks! That’s a new development, it was still listed as “in development” a few days ago.
I’ll check it out later.
I took a little look at it this evening. The bigscreen interface does work (even with custom instructions about using the right stick to zoom) but it looks like they forgot to redirect bbc.co.uk/iplayer to bbc.co.uk/iplayer/bigscreen when you visit using a PS3. Oops!