So, what’s the current state of play in general for catching up on missed TV using a PS3 in the UK?

The BBC is clearly well ahead of the others here, but Five’s offering is surprisingly good. STV could fix their site with some small tweaks to allow the Flash player to load correctly, but the others have far more work to do if they wish to take advantage of all those PS3 users hungry for easy-to-access TV content.

Anyway, the situation in general highlights problems both broadcasters and hardware platform owners currently have; in a world of standards, there’s very little standard across both the catchup content from the broadcasters and the environments provided by each device. In a case of “somebody else’s problem” broadcasters need to produce and distribute a large number of different encodes to cover different devices as well as produce interfaces bespoke to (or specifically optimised for) each device they wish to support. Hardware platform owners also face similar problems; specific support for each broadcaster has to be added and where 3rd-party licensed technology is used, the appropriate and often costly licenses obtained.

We can only hope that cross-broadcaster projects and standards (such as the ill-fated Project Kangaroo and the pending Project Canvas) get the green-light and are eventually widely adopted.

Not only does the obfuscation make it difficult to write the required regular expressions (a way for programs to look through text and pick out and modify specific sections), it also makes finding and understanding any changes needlessly time-consuming.

Now, I’m all for companies protecting their IP by taking measures to protect any source code that has to run client-side (i.e. Javascript), but in the BBC’s case I don’t see why they do this with iPlayer. The iPlayer uses a few BBC specific libraries for handling the UI elements (e.g. the carousel), but nothing that couldn’t be replaced with a number freely available open-source libraries.

The BBC is also a public body that really should be keeping these things open for people to look at and learn from and it’s not as if javascript obfuscation is any real protection against any commercial organisation that’s intent on saving a time and money by stealing the BBC’s code. I can understand that when it comes to the content, they have to be careful to respect the rights-holders’ wishes, but as far as I can tell, the iPlayer’s javascript is entirely the BBC’s own IP.

The framerate isn’t as smooth as I’d like, so I might try and implement the BBC’s high/normal quality switch so users can decide between image quality or framerate.

Update: It didn’t take long for me to have enough of the choppy playback. I’ve gone ahead and implemented the BBC’s high/normal quality switch. As with the BBC’s iPlayer on the PC, the default quality is ‘normal’ and if you click ‘Play high quality’, it will play the H.264 stream. You can tell which version it’s going to play as it appears in parentheses after the ‘Press X to play’ message.

For those wondering, despite the BBC officially supporting the PS3, PS3iPlayer.com will not be vanishing. For those who prefer its interface to the BBC’s offering, I’ll try to keep it well-maintained. Speaking of which, tonight I’ll add support for 2.53’s full-screen support and see if it helps with the H.264 problems we’ve been having.

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.

For now I’ve switched PS3 iPlayer back to the normal PC version. The big question is which do you guys prefer? The easy-to-use minimal interface designed for use with a remote, or the more informative ‘traditional’ version? How about Steve’s idea of a button to switch between the two, or is there some sort of half-way-house that people would like?

Also, some great news from Anthony Rose’s blog post:

PS: We’re also working on bringing BBC iPlayer to Sony PS3, but we’re not quite there yet as the PS3 uses a slightly older version of Flash which doesn’t support some of the features used in our media player, and the very promising Flash 9 update now available on PS3 has some compatibility issues. Our Flash developers are working on it – stay tuned for updates.

If you want to try it out, go to:
TV Channels -> BBC3 -> Watch Live link (top right when on-air)

You can also just go directly to the pages at:

• http://www.ps3iplayer.com/iplayer/playlive/bbc_three/
• http://www.ps3iplayer.com/iplayer/playlive/bbc_four/
• http://www.ps3iplayer.com/iplayer/playlive/bbc_news24/

Enjoy!

Now for the bad news – it doesn’t seem to work. It exhibits the same behaviour as if you try viewing the H264 streams using a version of Flash prior to 9.0.115.0, i.e it connects successfully to the RTMP server, buffers, then stops, displaying nothing but a black screen. This suggests it is either completely incapable of decoding H264 streams (which would be an odd omission considering MP4 is the mainstay of the PS3’s video support) or that there’s something in the stream that it doesn’t like.

So I’m afraid it’s VP6 for now.

P.S. If anyone in the know happens to come across this post and feels like saving me a lot of time poking around trying to get it to work, it’d be great of you could leave a comment or contact me directly regarding the status of Flash H264 support on the PS3.

If true, it has yet to be seen just how complete the implementation will be, but considering how closed Macromedia/Adobe have kept Flash since version 7 (the current implementation in the PS3 browser was written by Sony themselves) this suggests that Adobe have been involved this time, which should (fingers-crossed) mean a full implementation.

What does this mean for PS3 iPlayer? Well bbc.co.uk/iplayer still won’t work unless the PS3’s JavaScript implementation has been fixed, but this should mean we can return to using the BBC’s full-featured embedded Flash media player, and along with it, support for the codecs used in the lower bit-rate streams. The result should mean much better quality video (on par with the PC), fewer problems on slower connections and being able to buffer the video content whilst paused (a limitation of Flash 7).

As soon as the firmware hits, I’ll get straight to work making any required changes.

Update: And it’s (semi-)official – ThreeSpeech states that from v2.50, “Flash 9 content becomes supported on the Internet Browser.”