A few weeks later than we predicted, the BBC today introduced new iPlayer software that lets Mac and Linux users download shows to their computers for offline viewing, a feature enjoyed by Windows users since the launch of the service.
If you are in the UK and connected to the internet you can already play programmes from the past seven days and watch them on the website through Click to Play (streaming). This works on Windows, Macs, Linux, Nintendo Wii and iPhones.
All your music anywhere with PulpTunes 1.0, a web server for iTunes which enables users to access their full music libraries from a remote Mac or PC using a web browser.
Released this week, the developer has invested in a new user interface and reports the new build software to be “stable”.
The Open Source software is available for download now, with a different version for each platform (including one version for Linux).
There’s been a whole hoo-hah about the BBC making it possible to download its TV shows to Mac and Linux computers – now it seems the broadcaster may be moving to launch the service, which is already available on Windows, and the launch could come this month, if a report’s to be believed.
The broadcaster has frequently gone on the record to say that it wants to make it possible to download shows from iPlayer to the Mac, but has castigated Apple for refusing to license FairPlay to the corporation in order to easily achieve this.
Following on from our predictions for the Apple TV earlier this week and yesterday’s insightful presentation by Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, Netflix today announced of Linux and open source boffin Greg Peters as vice president of partner development.
In making the move, Netflix also confirmed its interest in helping push for services and hardware to let consumers access streaming content on their TVs, showing Apple to have some competition in the den.
In related news, a note on the BBC blog reveals significant progress bringing TV and radio show downloads on demand to the Linux platform. (BTW – anyone notice that this is embedded iPlayer content…)
Linux users are promised a new way to play music purchased from iTunes that is protected by Apple’s FairPlay DRM on the Linux operating system.
Broken Fractal Ventures has announced the immediate and free availability of a GStreamer plugin dubbed “El Tunes” which lets Linux users play FairPlay DRMed music tracks purchased via Apple’s iTunes Music Store. The software doesn’t remove the DRM, rather it acts as an unofficial FairPlay implementation on Linux.
El Tunes has been tested on Ubuntu 8.04 using RhythmBox but should function on any modern Linux Distro with GStreamer and a media player that utilizes GStreamer. The company is offering tested packages for Ubuntu and a gzipped tarball for all other Linux distributions. If using the tarball, untar it as root as it installs system-wide.
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