All entries for Friday 07 March 2008

Oh ho ho – iplayer hits the iPod Touch

Writing about web page http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/bbcinternet/2008/03/bbc_iplayer_on_iphone_behind_t.html

Hey Hey!

The BBC today launched the iPlayer for the iPod Touch and iPhone.

Joy oh joy oh joy.

Looks and sounds awesome (in my immediate opinion – I remain to be proven wrong in the coming days).

What’s most interesting is the associated blog post where Anthony Rose describes the transcoding process whereby all the lovely BBc programmes make it to the iPlayer for download or streaming.

Those input files are encoded at over 50Mbps which makes them huge – around 25GB per hour of incoming video. With eight BBC TV channels plus 18 regional news broadcasts, that means we need to deal with up to 24 simultaneous incoming programmes, for a peak data rate of over a gigabit per second of incoming video.

It sounds like this is scratching the surface of a pretty impressive process.

Tom Abbott : 07 Mar 2008 20:40 |  Tags: Digital Media |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem