BBC iPlayer: seems to work well on Windows XP but what about the rest of us?

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 18 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

A few weeks back, I started to listen to one of my favourite podcasts – BBC Radio 4’s The Now Show, only to be greeted with:

“We’re sorry that The Now Show podcast isn’t available for this series. The podcast was part of a trial, which has now come to an end; however you can still listen to the programme for seven days after broadcast, via the Radio 4 website.”

The clip then continued by advertising other BBC Radio 4 podcasts – obviously not “part of a trial which has now come to an end”. This annoys me tremendously – the BBC is a fine broadcaster but as as it dumbs down its main news programmes and airs more and more tabloid TV (leave that to ITV please), I’m not sure that my license fee is being well spent (that’s how the BBC is funded – from the sale of it’s programmes, and from a mandatory annual fee for all UK households and businesses with a device that’s capable of receiving a TV signal – even if it only receives subscription services like satellite or cable TV). You see, the BBC has spent millions developing a new service called iPlayer (it’s a pity they couldn’t have spent a few more pounds registering the iplayer.com domain) which will allow registered users (as long as they have a UK-registered IP address) to download programmes from the Internet. On the face of it, that sounds good, except that it’s been bogged down by DRM and that’s limited the availability of the service.

A few months back, Microsoft UK’s James O’Neill and I were engaged in an online (and face-to-face) debate about the need (or not) for digital rights management (DRM). James’ argument is that content providers have a right to protect their copyrighted material, that Windows Media codecs are available or Mac users and that Linux users would never allow a Microsoft product (i.e. a Linux port of Windows Media Player) on their system. My argument is that piracy would be insignificant if an easy to use digital media system could be created which works regardless of the device and operating system and with media at a price for which people would be happy to pay without a moment’s thought – that Microsoft Windows Media, Apple FairPlay and competing technologies should be made to work together – just as Mark James proposes in his call for open standards in digital rights management. Instead, the BBC (following the path set by a rival broadcaster, Channel 4) have provided a service which will only work on a subset of Windows PCs.

I recently saw a trailer for a BBC series called Mountain which was advertised as “coming soon” but I missed the first couple of episodes. Realising this, I thought that this would be an opportunity to try out the iPlayer service but if I’m going to give up the comfort of my living room to watch TV on the computer, I want to do it with my computer that’s hooked up to a decent display – that will be the Mac then. Not with iPlayer – it’s Windows only (so much for the accessibility which BBC services should maintain). Not to worry, I have a decent Windows PC too… oops, that runs Vista… iPlayer only works with Windows XP, Windows Media Player 10 and Internet Explorer 6 (or later) with JavaScript, ActiveX and cookies enabled. Now, looking at the statistics for this site, Windows XP users only account for about 60% of my visitors (even if they prefer to use another browser, they will have IE6 installed). Sure, my readers are highly technical (and hence more likely to try something other than the norm) but so will those who are interested in watching TV across the Internet – at least in 2007 (I expect things to change over the next couple of years) – so the BBC has instantly excluded 40% of it’s potential audience (even more if their IP addresses don’t appear to be served from the UK). Furthermore, for a service that was supposed to have launched a fortnight ago, it’s still carrying a beta label and signup is a painfully slow process. In fact a BBC representative wrote on an iPlayer support forum:

“We have chosen initially not to market or publish widely the availability of the service as we wanted to see what the initial demand would be – and interest so far has been extremely strong.”

Hmm… I read a press release announcing that the service would be launched on 27th July 2007 (which was subsequently picked up by many newspapers and websites) – I think that is both marketing and publishing the availability of the service. So what’s all this beta nonsense about then? It seems that the BBC’s Press Office is not talking to the BBC’s iPlayer people…

Once I set up a Windows XP PC and got my login details for the iPlayer service (after a wait of several hours… suggesting a level of manual intervention in the process), I found that they didn’t do much for me. The BBC’s own advice is to save the iPlayer login on the computer (if I’ve saved my login details in a cookie, what’s the point in having a login?) and then before I could download any content I had to register for a separate bbc.co.uk account (which seems to require more personal details than I would like to give away). At least that was an immediate process (even if the first few usernames I tried were taken) and I was finally able to download my programme.

BBC iPlayer - downloading

Download speeds were good (in the region of 2Mbps), although the reference to the number of sources from which I was downloading alerted me to that fact that this is a peer-to-peer service (the BBC uses VeriSign’s Kontiki delivery management system) – in which case am I giving up some of my bandwidth for the BBC to distribute its content to others? (Oh the irony of a DRM-protected service using P2P for distribution!) More to the point, what effect will that have on my bandwidth usage if I’m limited by my ISP, or if they implement network controls to limit access to the service?

The BBC website had given me the impression (obviously misguided) that programmes would be available for download up to 7 days after broadcast and then to view for a further 30 days. Apparently that’s not so, as the 30 day clock seems to start ticking at broadcast time (not download time), so my programme actually had 23 days left for me to watch it. BBC iPlayer - expiry Furthermore, it seems that once I start to watch a programme I only have 7 days to watch it before it expires. Those timescales seem pretty tight (there are no such limits with other time shifting technologies, whether I use a simple video cassette recorder or something more complex) and it’s this inflexibility that makes me so critical of DRM.

The content itself is pretty good quality – at least the episode of Click that I used to test the service (not to be confused with the streamed version available from the BBC website) looked fine in full screen mode on a standard 1024×768 laptop display although, somewhat annoyingly, a BBC News 24 ticker was visible on the bottom of the screen throughout the programme (that shouldn’t be a problem for most programmes). Also, despite advertising itself as a 30-minute programme, this particular episode turned out to be the short (just under 12 minute) version. Actually, once you find a PC that meets the iPlayer specifications, the service is pretty good. I just think that the BBC should cast it’s net a little further and include Macintosh and Linux users in its online audience.

Word 2003 to 2007 command conversion

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 18 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

The Office 2007 ribbon UI is fantastic but it’s also a right pain until you get used to where everything is (and I still rely on Office 2003 keyboard shortcuts). Now, help is at hand with the interactive Word 2003 to Word 2007 command reference guide.

Problems with Microsoft Update

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 18 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Over the last few days, I’ve been having problems connecting to Microsoft Update from a newly built Windows Server 2003 R2 server. Whilst searching for updates, it’s was hanging (green progress bar pulsing across the screen) before eventually reporting:

[Error number: 0x80244023]

The website has encountered a problem and cannot display the page you are trying to view. The options provided below might help you solve the problem.

For self-help options:

Frequently Asked Questions
Find Solutions
Windows Update Newsgroup

For assisted support options:

Microsoft Online Assisted Support (no-cost for Windows Update issues)

Sadly, Microsoft’s Online Assisted Support didn’t do much assisting – it only pointed me back to the knowledge base, newsgroups, or paid incident support but the problem did go away all by itself (yes, really)!

In the meantime, I’d asked for help on the Microsoft Windows Update discussion group and a really helpful MVP called TaurArian replied pointing me in the direction of the MSDN reference for Windows Update agent networking error codes. Useful stuff – and it turns out that 80244023 is WU_E_PT_HTTP_STATUS_GATEWAY_TIMEOUT – i.e. proxy server problems (and probably the reason why the problem seemed to cure itself).

Blogging from within Microsoft Office

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 18 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

I’ve just started using Microsoft Office OneNote again (last time I tried, I lost all my data after a hard disk crash and, as I’m so bad at backups, I stuck with paper for a while but now my bookshelf is getting a bit full of Black n’ Red spiral bound notebooks and it really is time I got back with the program).

Spending as much time on the road as I do, and looking at the state of my desk, I’m determined to progress towards a paperless office and I’m convinced that OneNote is part of that solution – even if you’re not using a tablet PC (I’m not), it’s just a great way to stay organised.

Anyway, tonight I found another great feature – the Blog This option in OneNote (actually it’s in Word, but OneNote exposes the option as a simple right-click). Just tell it your blog provider details and it will send the current page from your notebook to your blog. Epstein Llewellyn’s has written a great tuturial for WordPress users.

Those who’ve tried writing HTML in Word before will be pleased to hear that it didn’t even create any HTML bloat!

Avoiding Windows Server 2003 R2 product activation after using non-VLK media

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 18 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Last month I wrote about how it’s possible to upgrade a retail copy of Windows Vista to an Enterprise version and it turns out that this is also possible with other versions of Windows.

Last week I needed to build a new server with Windows Server 2003 R2 and my colleague who was supplying the media only brought 32-bit CDs with him (with 8GB of RAM for this server to run multiple virtual machines, it makes sense to use a 64-bit operating system). I spent most of the day downloading 64-bit CD images from various file shares around the company (in theory, because we’d bought the appropriate licenses, it shouldn’t matter what media we used) but when the volume licensing key (VLK) that I’d been given didn’t work we realised that the disc image we were using was an MSDN version. After supplying a product key that did work and going through all the hassle of getting the server added to the corporate domain, Windows notified me that I had 55 days left to activate the product, so I finished installing the applications today and then “upgraded” using the correct volume license media and key, removing the requirement for product activation.

Another point that’s worth noting (thanks to Daniel Petri for this tip) is that the .IMG files that Microsoft provided in the “ISO only” download appear to be just ISO 9660 (.ISO) files with a different file extension. Either way, the cdburn.exe resource kit tool was able to write them on my Windows Vista PC (although it did report an error when trying to eject the CD).

Forefront Client Security

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 18 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

A couple of years back, Microsoft bought a load of security companies and since then we’ve seen them continue to offer FrontBridge services as Microsoft Exchange Hosted Services; Windows Defender was born out of the previous Giant Company anti-spyware product, and a couple of months back they released Forefront Client Security (FCS) – which I believe is based on the technology gained from the purchase of Sybari.

Yesterday, I spent some time working though a hands-on lab for Forefront Client Security and it seems pretty good. What follows is not a full product review (a demo is available on the Microsoft web site), but some of the highlights I picked out from the lab.

  • In line with most anti-virus clients, Forefront Client Security displays a taskbar icon to indicate status. Depending on the policies applied (from an FCS management console), this will allow a user to launch the client software.
  • Quick scans check for viruses and spyware in:
    • Processes loaded in memory.
    • User profile, Desktop, system folders and Program Files folder.
    • Common malware infection points (auto start registry entries, etc.)
  • FCS does not scan removable or network disks
  • Periodic quick scans should be scheduled in order to make use of the latest definitions to detect any malware that may have infected a computer between the previous scan and the application of new definitions.
  • Real time protection detects and prevents malware attacks immediately
  • Quarantined files are stored as encrypted files inside a .CAB in a subfolder under C:\Documents and Settings\All Users
  • Event log messages may include the acronym MCPAVAS (Microsoft Client Protection Anti-Virus Anti-Spyware)
  • Definition updates are stored at C:\Users\All Users\Microsoft\Microsoft Forefront\Client Security\Client\Antimalware\Definition Updates\{GUID}
  • To reduce the size of definition file transfers, FCS uses a system of base and delta definition files. Key files are:
    • mpengine.dll – malware scanning engine
    • mpasbase.vdm – antivirus base definition file
    • mpasdlta.vdm – antvirus delta definition file
    • mpavbase.vdm – antivirus base definition file
    • mpavdlta.vdm – antvirus delta definition file
  • Definition updates are available from Microsoft Update (or WSUS for internal deployments). Because WSUS uses a daily synchronisation schedule, FCS installs a service (the Microsoft Forefront Client Security Update Assistant service) that automatically connects WSUS to Microsoft Update every hour to retreive definition updates. This service also automatically approves updates for distribution and installation so that updates are always available within one hour of release (although it should be noted that there may be a further delay before updates are retrieved depending on the frequency of client update checks).
  • FCS policies (e.g. to control the level of user interaction and reporting, or to specify allowed applications) are managed using the Microsoft Forefront Client Security Console.
    • FCS policies can be deployed to organizational units (OUs), security groups, or manually (using a registry file). Group policy objects (GPOs) may also be created manually.
    • Upon deployment via OU or security group, FCS uses the group policy management console (GPMC) API to create a new GPO (named fcspolicyname-{guid} which is applied to the appropriate OU or filtered based on security group membership. This policy is unlinked and deleted when the FCS policy is undeployed. Group policy updates may need to be forced using the gpupdate /force command and Kerberos ticket renewal may delay group-based policy application.
    • For local policy file deployment (e.g. using a registry file), a tool is provided on the FCS product CD-ROM (fcslocalpolicytool.exe).
    • As with other group policies, settings deployed via FCS policies are unavailable to users (greyed out).
  • FCS also includes a report viewer for management purposes, e.g. for security state analysis.

It may be useful to note that the European expert group for IT security (EICAR) produces an anti-virus test file that can be useful for fine-tuning anti-virus processes and procedures. The Microsoft Malware Protection Center includes threat research and response information (similar to the services offered by other anti-virus vendors) as well as details of the latest definition updates.

Links

Forefront Client Security team blog.

Kernel panic

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 18 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

I’ve written before about how, according to Apple, reason number 1 to get a Mac is because “all the hardware and software just works, and works well together“. I can’t be bothered to get into the whole Mac vs. [Windows] PC (vs. Linux) thing now… I’ve written plenty on that subject before, and anyway – it’s just a PC – but no sooner had I just commented to Alex about how a certain podcast presenter is very quick to criticise Windows for it’s blue screens of death (of which I’ve seen very few in recent years – and only then because I’ve done something stupid like installing the wrong device driver or removing a hard disk before powering down the computer), did I witness my first OS X kernel panic (actually, from looking at /Library/Logs/panic.log, I seems that I had one a few days ago as well, which explains why the Mac had strangely shut itself down whilst I was at work one day last week).

Mac OS X kernel panic

So, my point is that Macs don’t “just work”. They run software, created by humans, that crashes from time to time, just like non-Apple PCs running any other operating system. Now, if Apple really could create “the world’s most advanced operating system” and it did “just work”, I’d be very impressed.

Tab completion in Windows

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 18 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Many people will be familiar with the command line tab completion functionality that can be used to complete folder and filenames in recent versions of Windows, but what I wasn’t aware of (until I just used it, following some instructions from Microsoft in a hands-on lab training manual) was that wildcards like *.reg <tab> can be used to tab-complete filenames. This technique can even be used as arguments to a longer command, e.g. notepad *.reg <tab>.

Dustin L makes a good point in his comment on the Lifehacker article that discusses command line tab completion – Unix admins will already be familiar with the concept but there are a couple of differences between the Windows and Unix/Linux CLI tab completion implementations:

  • “In the Windows command line, if there is more than one match for what you’ve typed, successive presses will cycle through all of the matches rather than just display a list of the matches.
  • Windows will not complete commands, only files and directories.”

Useful digital photography utilities

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 18 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

I’ve just got back from a weekend in the Peak District National Park and, rewarded with clear blue skies as dawn broke yesterday morning, I rushed to the top of Mam Tor to rekindle my long-dormant desire to make great landscape photographs (I’m no Joe Cornish, but there has to be some reward for leaving my tent at 5.15).

It gave me a chance to try out a number of things that I’ve wanted to do for a while – shooting camera raw (.NEF) images and using the Lee Filters 0.6 ND graduated filter that I bought a couple of years ago. I have to say, that I am definitely a convert to these features (although they would not be practical for the majority of my photography which falls into the “snapshots of the kids” category). Both the OS X Preview application and my post-production tool of choice (Adobe Photoshop CS2) had no difficulty opening the camera raw files and the quality is excellent (Windows users might find this post useful). Meanwhile, whilst using a large graduated filter on a camera with only a 24mm image sensor makes it slightly difficult to position, using the 0.6 ND filter to tone down the sky by two stops meant that I was able to take pictures with a well-exposed foreground, without washing out the highlights.

Renamer4MacI also found a couple of little programs came in useful when I got home. Firstly, having had some issues with my CF card before leaving home, I formatted it and the file numbering recommenced from DSC_0001.* – thanks to a little recommendation from my buddy Alex, I used Renamer4Mac to bulk rename the files. Also useful (although not for the RAW files) was Simple EXIF Viewer for Mac OS XAli Ozer’s Simple EXIF Viewer for Mac OS X, which let me easily examine the EXIF data on my images (something sadly lacking in the OS X Finder).

Finally, whilst writing about OS X and digital photography (apologies to Windows readers but my digital photography workflow is based on a Mac) it’s worth mentioning one little tip that can come in useful (much as I hate to publicise anything from Scott Bourne, whose “advice” often serves only to fuel Apple elitism and general Mac vs. PC bigotry, I think I picked this up from an iLifeZone podcast). Previewing multiple images in Mac OS XUnlike the Windows Preview function, which lets viewers page forwards and backwards through a directory of files, the OS X Preview default is to open just a single file. Switchers are often frustrated by this (I know I was) but it is possible to open multiple images in Preview (by selecting multiple files, then choosing to open with Preview), after which the cursor keys can be used to scroll through the list.

Virtualised demonstrations eating all your memory? Try a ReadyBoost USB key

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 18 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Even though Windows Vista will run on lower-specification PCs (it’s fine on my ThinkPad T40 with 512MB RAM), once you add a few applications (like Office 2007), it really starts to bog down and I was struggling recently with 1GB RAM on my work notebook (it’s been fine since I added another gig). If you also run virtual machines (e.g. for product testing or demonstrations), then its not long before the requirements for physical RAM run up against the limits of a 32-bit address space.

Last week, my colleague Alistair (soon to be an ex-colleague as he’s off to Conchango – where I used to work, proving that the UK IT industry is a very small world!) was raving about the Corsair Flash Voyager USB drives. Not only are they shock and water-resistant, but the GT model is ReadyBoost compatible, meaning that if you need a bit of extra RAM in your PC you can plug in your USB key. USB will be slower than on-board memory, and other ReadyBoost compatible drives are available, but the Flash Voyager GT is heralded as one of the fastest such devices available today. Even better, the ReadyBoost memory is a separate address space, so you can exceed the 4GB limit for a 32-bit architecture.

There’s a useful ReadyBoost FAQ at Tom Archer’s blog.