Watching video on RISC OS isn't very easy. We've run an article here on how you can download and convert YouTube videos into a format RISC OS can understand. Though it's very clever, and the tools involved are actively developed, it's not as simple as clicking 'Play' in a browser window.
 
Improving this situation has been hampered up until now for two main reasons:

• RISC OS hardware has been too slow to play back video at an acceptable rate;
• RISC OS software hasn't supported popular codecs (formats), some of which are proprietary and expensive to license.

 
The first of these is already well on the way to being fixed. The Beagleboard is modestly powered in comparison to the average desktop PC, but it's perfectly capable of playing video at a decent rate. The diminutive boards have been shown running 720p video (a high-definition format) while running a Linux distribution - have a look here to see this in action.
 
The RISC OS port can't quite match that yet. All that might be about to change, though, due to the development of something called Theorarm. This is a library of routines to enable the playing of videos in the Ogg Theora format on ARM-based machines. Ogg Theora is a relatively new format, but it has some interesting features. Perhaps most importantly, it's entirely open source, so videos encoded using the technology can be played back by any suitably-written software. Moreover, Theora is one of the contenders for the [video] tag in the new HTML5 specification. That means that it may become a significant rival to the more common MPEG and Flash videos on the web.
 
Theorarm is interesting, as it's been optimised for newer ARM chips using hand-written assembly code. This makes it very fast. The developer, Robin Watts (of Warm Silence Software fame) has done some development work on the Beagleboard, with promising results: "With post processing disabled, I can play a PAL DVD sized film (720x576x25fps, 48kHz stereo audio track) in realtime with software YUV2RGB. The limited profiling I've done, along with some back-of-an-envelope maths suggests that we should just about be able to do 720p films if the YUV2RGB process is done by hardware." That means, in English, that DVD-quality film can be played back on a Beagleboard with decent audio too. If some of the complex conversions from YUV colour format to RGB could be carried out in hardware, then higher definition films could be played.
 
This is pretty exciting stuff for Beagleboard owners. If Theorarm is ported to RISC OS (and there's no reason, other than developer time and effort, why it couldn't be), then we'd have the basis of a fast, native video playback system. Some issues would require addressing, of course, since RISC OS can't handle the Beagleboard's YUV facility - see here for Jeffrey Lee's proposals to fix this - but these are all surmountable.
 
If anyone is interested in getting involved, then the ROOL project is the place to start. In particular, the proposals for working on the GraphicsV vector need attention from developers with the right level of experience, and the draft API on the ROOL site could do with some more exposure.
 
A few years ago, RISC OS lacked fast hardware, a half-capable browser and a media player capable of showing popular streaming video formats. The first two are being actively addressed - what are the chances that the last one will be as well?
 

One of the frustrating things about being a RISC OS user, is its lack of support for commonly-used video formats, other than its own dedicated Replay system.
 
A few attempts have been made to remedy this situation, but, until recently, they have come to nothing.
 
In the mid-1990s, Innovative Media Solutions produced a range of Acorn readers for PC-format, educational CDs, such as Microsoft Dinosaurs and Dorling Kindersley's The Way Things Work. These readers included dedicated versions of ARMovie, which could convert the CD’s AVI files to Replay format on the fly.
 
Unfortunately, the work that IMS had done, did not result in the release of a souped-up version of Replay, which could play all Quicktime and AVI movies, despite the fact that RISCOS Ltd seem to have done some work in this area about five years ago.
 
But now, with the release of the open-source applications, Murnong and FFMpeg, by Chris Martin, things have started to take a turn for the better.
 
Although RISC OS still does not have a proper media player, which can play all the common video formats, we do now have the next best thing - an application that can capture a YouTube video stream as it arrives, and convert it to an MPEG file, which can be played using KinoAmp.
 
 

Here's the plan: take an old Mac mini, blow the dust off it, and repurpose it as a media centre. In particular, I wanted it to:

• Watch and record Freeview channels
• Watch shows on BBC iPlayer
• Play downloaded videos

Here's how I got on.
 

A while ago you may remember that I wrote an article about video conversion for RISC OS, and near the end raised the topic of video conversion on RISC OS using a port of ffmpeg. Although the version of ffmpeg I originally tried on RISC OS was old and broken, Christopher Martin obviously thinks there's some merit to this approach, as he has recently produced !FFmpeg, a working port of ffmpeg for RISC OS.
 
Once more in the interests of SCIENCE, I threw a few test videos at !FFmpeg and measured its performance against that of a similar version of ffmpeg running on my Windows PC.

 

Yeah, that whole "updating a website" thing. We're quite shit at it, aren't we?
 
We do have some good stuff coming up, though. In the meantime, if you've not seen it, I recommend watching Hyperland - a 1990 Douglas Adams documentary. To say much more would spoil it, but it's fascinating stuff, especially considering when it was made.
 
Pity about the snipe at Filthy, Rich & Catflap at the start, mind you. (Indeed, the snipes at telly are pretty misjudged as a whole.) It's utterly wonderful, and I recommend you buy the DVD if you haven't seen it. At £6.99, what is there to lose? Well, apart from £6.99, of course.
 

The latest issue of Vanity Fair carries an interesting article about sharing TV programmes and movies using BitTorrent. Refreshingly fair and honest, it features an interview with The Pirate Bay, a popular Swedish torrent site (who, revelling in their reputation for flaunting their legal threats, recently launched OscarTorrents.com, containing links to torrents for all the 2007 Oscar nominated films.)
 
Meanwhile, more music execs are following Steve Jobs' lead in moving away from DRM. Daring Fireball examines the strategy behind Jobs' memo and its criticism.
 
(Yep, it's another annoyingly brief update, but dammit there's new episodes of 24 to watch!)
 
Link: Pirates of the Multiplex
 

Whatever Your Favourite Platform™ is, it might be an idea to listen to Boing Boing and take part in this questionnaire about the future of the BBC's on-demand services.
 
When one of the questions is "How important is it that the proposed seven-day catch-up service over the internet is available to consumers who are not using Microsoft software?", I think it's important to let them know "very". Even if you personally use Windows, the BBC shouldn't lock down its services to one vendor.
 

Hey, we're not one of those sites that just posts YouTube videos, honest. We also post Google Video too.
 
So, if you've not seen it before, you have to watch this Windows/386 promo video. It may be your usual nonsense at the start... but wait until it gets to seven minutes in. I CAN'T STAND THE CONFUSION IN MY MIND.
 
(Via Daring Fireball.)