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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So after finally getting my XP installation ported over to VirtualBox, I could drop the installation of Wine.  The bummer here is that I did not uninstall any of the Wine Applications before uninstalling Wine.  This kept the Wine menu item appearing down the left-hand menu screen.

I was hoping I could simply right-click and remove item, but that isn’t so I’m afraid.  After a bit of digging, I found the problem file to remove was in Home/.local/share/applications

the .local or .folder files are not visible so through Dolphin, I click View, Show Hidden Files.  I was then able to navigate and remove the problem file.  Thanks to this gnome link:  http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=44936

Now that I have had a couple weeks to thoroughly break in my Samsung NC10 laptop running Ubuntu Karmic.  I have decided it’s high-time to get some more media setup.  Namely the BBC iPlayer.

This is available however, there are two prerequisites.  Adobe Flash, and Adobe AIR.  Adobe Flash installs seamless through the software center.  However, Adobe AIR is a much more manual process because of the license agreement.  Here are my steps.

1. GO to http://www.adobe.com/products/air/
2. Click on the Get Adobe AIR link towards the right of the page
3. Once the download is complete, right-click the file in FireFox
4. Click ‘Open Containing Folder’
5. Right click the file and select properties
6. Go to the Permissions Tab
7. Set all the rights to ‘Read Write’
8. Tick ‘Allow executing file as a program’
9. Open up a console (System Tools Menu in Gnome)
10. In a console, navigate to the ‘Containing Folder’ above (ie cd Downloads)
11. ls (now make sure you see the file you downloaded)
12. type in ./AdobeAIRInstaller.bin
13. If you accept the license agreement click I Agree
14. Enter your password if prompted to continue the installation
15. The install window should close and is now Complete! (For Adobe AIR)

BUT.. at the moment of this writing… Firefox will not display BBC iPlayer flash content (flash version 10.0.32.18).  However, I have Konqueror installed, and I am able to stream BBC content only.

To be continued…