bgror

BBC iPlayer on the iPhone »

Created at: 08.03.2008 20:23, source: Slash Dot Dash, tagged: iPhone

Yesterday the BBC announced that their iPlayer video on demand service was available for the iPhone (and iPod Touch). There’s a more in depth post on the BBC Internet Blog where they give details on the technical implementation.

Back to BBC iPlayer on iPhone implementation: we’re not using the new Apple SDK, nor are we using the much-rumoured Flash for iPhone (no – we haven’t seen it, either). Instead, we’re creating 516Kbps streams (400Kbps H.264 video, 116Kbps AAC audio) that show off BBC programmes brilliantly on an iPhone.

It’s interesting to read about the raw processing power required to transcode their 24 simultaneous incoming programmes, for a peak data rate of over a gigabit per second of incoming video.

I tried out an episode of Top Gear and was impressed with both the streaming speed and the quality of the video (check out the images below). The only downside is that it only supports streaming and requires a WiFi connection; unsurprisingly, EDGE isn’t fast enough. Ideally it would be fantastic to be able to download a programme to watch ‘offline’, such as on a train (I’ll keep my finger’s crossed).

Update

-Update I: I knocked up a quick Ruby script to download the mp4 files that the iPhone version uses (it uses wget).- (The script no-longer works due to BBC attempts to prevent downloads).

Update II: Paul Battley has written a Ruby library, iplayer-dl, for downloading the BBC iPlayer videos.

Contributing to “Advanced Rails Recipes” »

Created at: 29.02.2008 01:10, source: Slash Dot Dash, tagged: Ruby on Rails iPhone

The latest Beta update to the new Pragmatic Programmers book Advanced Rails Recipes: 72 New Ways to Build Stunning Rails Apps includes two chapters authored by myself.

They are both complete rewrites and updates of two of my popular blog posts Rails searching with Sphinx and iPhone on Rails – Creating an iPhone optimised version of your Rails site using iUI and Rails 2.

The new recipes are:

• Full-Text Search with Sphinx – includes a Rails site that uses Sphinx to index the Rails API.

• Support An iPhone Interface – with a TODO list app.

Along with these two (worth the purchase price on their own!), there are another 79 great recipes with some of the latest Rails best practices in small, easy to implement chunks.

Contributing to “Advanced Rails Recipes” »

Created at: 29.02.2008 01:10, source: Slash Dot Dash, tagged: Ruby on Rails iPhone

The latest Beta update to the new Pragmatic Programmers book Advanced Rails Recipes: 72 New Ways to Build Stunning Rails Apps includes two chapters authored by myself.

They are both complete rewrites and updates of two of my popular blog posts Rails searching with Sphinx and iPhone on Rails – Creating an iPhone optimised version of your Rails site using iUI and Rails 2.

The new recipes are:

• Full-Text Search with Sphinx – includes a Rails site that uses Sphinx to index the Rails API.

• Support An iPhone Interface – with a TODO list app.

Along with these two (worth the purchase price on their own!), there are another 79 great recipes with some of the latest Rails best practices in small, easy to implement chunks.