BBC Media Player update: fix for LSO "Flash cookies" issue
I am pleased to announce that after months of hard work by the BBC Media Playout Team we've completely rewritten the BBC Media Player and released it onto the BBC News, Sport and Weather sites. In coming weeks we'll be rolling the player out across the whole of BBC Online to enable smoother, better quality playback experience for users.
We've been keeping you informed along the way with our progress. James Hewines's original post (LSO ("Flash Cookies") and Media Player) explained that work was in progress to improve the Media Player and was later followed by a post from Paul Clark to update users on the progress of this (LSO ("Flash Cookies") and Media Player: Update). I am pleased to say that all LSO issues are now resolved with this release.
Although the new Media Player has broadly similar functionality to the current version, the design has changed significantly, as has the codebase, and this is a good opportunity to explain our decision for taking time to rewrite the Media Player and highlight the improvements made.
The benefits of converting the Media Player to the most recent version of Actionscript are many, but our primary reason is to provide the end-user with a better experience when viewing or listening to BBC content online. The new Media Player is written specifically to take advantage of the wealth of new features only supported by Flash Player 10 and above. These include:
• Better performance: smoother and faster content playout;
• A significantly smaller Media Player than the previous version used by News, Sport and Weather;
• Introduction of video streams which automatically adjust to changing network conditions, to ensure that the best stream is delivered to the client;
• The ability to display right-to-left scripts such as Arabic and Hebrew;
• The option to deliver streamed video content using standard HTTP in order to increase the scale, reach and performance;
• Improved support for mobile platforms.
Additional benefits include:
• Improved onward journeys: the new media player has a better in-screen related media experience;
• A new design which incorporates the GEL standards that are being rolled out across BBC Online.
I hope you enjoy using the new Media Player, it's a big step forward for us and brings clear benefits to audiences. We hope you like it as much as we do.
Samantha Grant is Technical Product Manager, BBC Future Media
Comment number 1.
At 12:59 12th May 2011, CheBourne wrote:Samantha - thanks for the update: only just gleaned that this had occurred from the previous posting (no update was posted there until I enquired). It seems that the minimum Adobe settings requirement is still to have 'Allow Third Party Flash Content to store data on your computer' ticked. This seems to be due to the LSO requiring a folder to be created called newsimg.bbc.co.uk - can this be sorted out so that Adobe flash settings can be completely locked down so that nothing is created by the BBC on the users computer? Many thanks.
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Comment number 2.
At 14:23 19th May 2011, Paul wrote:James, LSOs are still used to store information such as autoresume points and last volume setting. If you wish to set your privacy settings to deny newsimg.bbc.co.uk you can. It won't affect your ability to watch video.
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