A while back, the BBC approached +Canonical about providing seamless +access to unencumbered BBC content for all +Ubuntu users (in the UK and elsewhere). We +agreed to approach this by way of a plugin for our primary media player, +Totem, and asked +Collabora Multimedia to do the plugin +development work.
+ +The results are in what will shortly be released as Ubuntu 8.10, and are +looking really rather good. At the moment the content available from the BBC at +present is mostly audio, but support for video is in place and the feed is +expected to be fleshed out here over time. We have a genre classification +scheme in place, and will see how that scales as the amount of available +content grows. The code has been +submitted +upstream, although there are still a few issues to work out there.
+ +This is not the same thing as iPlayer; all the content available here is +DRM-free. Some of it is geographically restricted to the UK, and these +restrictions are handled on the server side to make sure that the client is +free of encumbrances.
+ +Christian Schaller from +Collabora posted +about this a little while ago. Since then, the UI has been improved somewhat +and some I/O issues have been fixed to the point where we felt comfortable +enabling the BBC plugin (as well as the YouTube plugin) by default in Ubuntu +8.10. Here's a +screenshot of +the current interface.
+ +This is exciting stuff with a lot of potential. To try it out, run +Applications -> Sound & Video -> Movie Player and select the "BBC" +entry from the drop-down box labelled "Playlist". If you find bugs, please +report +them!
