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.)
 

If you've got a lot of TV programmes or other video clips on a PC, chances are you'll be wanting to be able to play them on RISC OS as well. This article will explain how to use free tools to convert them to a suitable format for playback on RISC OS. Furthermore the process can be fully automated, so is ideal for processing large collections.