Psychology Technology

It seems that since I have upgraded from karmic 9.10 to lucid 10.04 that my bbc iplayer will not download programs.  Thus far the iplayer beta (2.0.2057) is OK, but appears to be very tempermental.

When I click to download a program, everything appears to work.  iplayer desktop fires up, adds the program to the download queue.  Then it just sits.  When clicking ‘More Information’ I can see the download speed at an astonishing 0 B/S swoooosh!

At the moment I’m attempting to install the beta iplayer.  I’ll update on that here when done. The uninstall for karmic/lucid is easy enough.  I uninstalled the iplayer through the software center, and then clicked through uninstall for Adobe Air Uninstaller (this was under the Applications, Other menu).

On the up-side, I can still watch the film by streaming it.  All that worked fine.  It was just the downloading part which screwed up.

I’m installing the beta now (version 2.0.2057).  The Ad-block plugin prevented the installation at first, so now that I’ve added the bbc website to be excluded the installation is sailing along on my Samsung Netbook NC10.

Frustratingly, once the installation finished (successfully), the iplayer crashed as soon as it started to download.  Also, it seems that the uninstallation routine leaves the history and downloaded content.  I say this because my downloads attempted on the earlier version appeared in the new beta install.  Perhaps that’s posted somewhere as being a feature or something..

OK so it appears that a minute in to any download now, the iplayer crashes out.  This might just be down to needing a restart… hrmmmm to be continued… after a restart the iplayer starts in offline mode, and the download shows as paused. After restarting the iplayer (yet once again) it appears to be downloading the single program I have queued.

What I probably should have tried at this point was to avoid the beta, and to remove and delete any pending downloads before uninstalling the iplayer.

Since initially getting the BBC iPlayer to work in Karmic, I can say that it also works after upgrading to Lucid without any probs.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like moonlight (That’s Silverlight for Linux) is going to get Microsoft to help with DRM any time soon, which means that sky.com movies and television will not be getting run natively on linux for the forseable future.

After a bit of digging, this blog post gives a bit more detail as to where PlayReady DRM and Microsoft are with regards to Moonlight and DRM:

http://migueldeicaza.disqus.com/releasing_moonlight_2_roadmap_to_moonlight_3_and_4_miguel_de_icaza/

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Because of some OS requirements (and limitations with Wine, and a lack of fortitude in attempting to configure it to ‘possibly’ work for me) I have added Virtualbox to my Ubuntu Karmic installation.  I did this so I could get an image of the windows xp that shipped with the netbook for those ‘because I have to’ moments.

Lacking a CD/DVD drive didn’t really make that much of a difference for me.  I took the system install CD created an image from my wife’s laptop.  I did this by firing up her version of Roxio Creator, and chose to create an ISO image.  Before burning, I also selected the RAW option.  If I remember correctly, RAW ensures that the image includes all errors that are in the image.  Sometimes, manufacturers include errors to avoid duplication.  However in my case, there was never more than one backup of the CD at any time.

I then took this image on a usb key, and moved it to my netbook.  Virtualbox picked up the iso without any problem, and about 45 minutes later the installation was complete.  The burning question I had was whether the product key would still work.

When I first got my laptop, being impatient I loaded up the default installation of XP for a quick play.  Sure enough, upon installation from the System Restore image, I was confronted with the ‘Key used maximum number of times’ message, advising me to contact whomever to buy another license.  However!  I noticed that the key that appeared onscreen was different from the key on my product key sticker!  After typing in the key that was on the netbook, the XP OS activated

I now have my Ubuntu Karmic installation working, and my XP virtual machine for those windows moments