George Wright responds to backstage questions
Post categories: News
| 10:21 UK time, Saturday, 1 November 2008
Some of the the efforts of the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ in Ubuntu 8.10 which was released on 30th October, to make a range of non-DRM content a. So we decided to catch up with one of the man behind the project, George Wright who is Portofolio Manager at Research and Innovaton. If Flash isn't your style we have the same video in , and . Each file is about 60-90meg big.
For those who prefer to read, George wrote a nice comment on this blog which we've copied.
I run the small team at the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ that's been working with the folks at Collabora, Canonical, and our partners in MetaBroadcast on this plugin.
Some quick answers (remember still beta :)
Jon - no, this isn't iPlayer content. It's content that's DRM-free - this service isn't (in any way!) a competitor to iPlayer, just different. Lots of the content is, in the first instance, our Radio podcasts, but there's video in there too. We hope to extend this content range during, and after, the build up to Intrepid's release
Harm - lots of this content *will* be available outside the UK. We have to work with the rights framework negotiated for our output, but in this case lots of it is indeed available abroad. Some isn't - sorry. We've aimed, with the plugin and some server side stuff, to only display content in the client that you can view/ listen to, depending on your location.
Christoph - you might have seen one of the bugs we've been squashing. A rogue line in our squid config meant that some 'stale' content was presented. This is fixed now (we hope) - on the other hand, perhaps you were seeing content that wasn't playable outside the UK. I can't be sure.
Martin - yes, we aren't huge fans of tree view either. Our work on this was focussed on a) getting our stack playing nice with gstreamer and Totem and the work done by Collabra and b) getting content into the system. We will be actively reviewing the UI to make it less, um, tree like. We have UI folk too and will be looking at this before release.
Andrew - good. We like free software and always wanted this to be pushed upstream and into other distros.
Oliver - think that's your VM - it played nice on a 2 year old sucky-ish HP laptop (can't remember spec) that we're testing on at work. We're also looking at the codec install stuff and hope it's easier. BBB played with just the one click on my (wiped and reinstalled almost daily atm for testing) intrepid box.
I'll be blogging a bit about this, and some other stuff we're doing with free software, over on the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Internet Blog - sorry to hijack this one but I hope that cleared up some questions
Regards
George Wright
Portfolio Manager, ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Research and Innovation
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