[LINK] Video streaming

[Roger Clarke]

Once upon a time, 'balkanisation of the Internet' referred to airgaps, firewalls, 'walled gardens', redirects and suchlike.

But authoritarian governments, control-oriented appliance-suppliers, monopoly content-owning corporations, and manipulative consumer marketing corporations, aren't all we have to worry about now.

Selectivity in standards support, disrespect for standards, and sheer ignorance by the people who run sites, appear to be key factors in increasing unreachability and dysfunctionality.

__________________

At 14:47 +1100 2/2/18, David wrote:
>Once upon a time I could happily play ABC iView and SBS on-demand videos.  But now I have the latest Linux, Firefox & Videolan packages with H.264 support, and Flash, and nothing much works at all.
>
>ABC iView plays at such a low frame-rate & resolution it's unwatchable.  The ABC seem to be doggedly persisting with Flash despite its terrible reputation regarding security and the fact it's disappearing from Firefox altogether, in fact all plugin support is going eventually.
>
>SBS on-demand doesn't work at all, but I don't think it uses Flash (?).  The Firefox browser console displays a mass of diagnostics beginning with "Error: window.SBS.ensighten is undefined".
>
>Videos on the Fairfax website don't work either.  I think it basically uses H.264 / MPEG-4 AVC, but the browser console reports:
>
>> Cannot play media. No decoders for requested formats: application/vnd.apple.mpegurl, audio/mpegurl, audio/x-mpegurl, application/x-mpegurl, video/x-mpegurl, video/mpegurl, application/mpegurl, application/dash+xml, video/mp4;codecs="avc1.4d400d mp4a.40.2", application/vnd.apple.mpegurl, application/vnd.apple.mpegurl, video/mp4, video/mp4, video/mp4, video/mp4
>
>But all is not lost, YouTube videos (H.264 / MPEG-4 AVC) work perfectly.  Pity I don't normally watch YouTube...
>
>There's more at https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/why-do-i-have-click-activate-plugins and the "compatibility" document linked at the top of the article if anyone's interested.
>
>DavidL.
>
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-- 
Roger Clarke                                 http://www.rogerclarke.com/
			             
Xamax Consultancy Pty Ltd      78 Sidaway St, Chapman ACT 2611 AUSTRALIA
Tel: +61 2 6288 6916                        http://about.me/roger.clarke
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Visiting Professor in the Faculty of Law            University of N.S.W.
Visiting Professor in Computer Science    Australian National University