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Dr Who?
Well, well... even the dear old Beeb is not immune to the current frenzy of anti-copying that seems to be sweeping the planet these days. The BBC have produced a new series of Dr Who and placed it online. Unfortunately it can only be watched by those with online access, and even then it has to be fairly good access. I have a slow dial-up connection these days so watching streaming files is a royal pain in the butt. What I usually do is download the file then watch it locally, on my hard drive.
I dug through the source of the page, found the files (a minor annoyance) and downloaded them, but they won't play locally for some reason. I may eventually work out how to do it, but I am not really a big fan of Dr Who -- I was interested mainly from a historical perspective -- so if it is too hard I just won't bother and the stupid files can just go unwatched. I've got better things to do with my time.
What, I wonder, is the point of all this anti-copying protection on files that are meant for free distribution in the first place? And where would Dr Who be if the anti-copying nuts had got their way years ago? Back in the early days of video recorders when the broadcasting companies were baying for blood in an attempt to prevent people taping TV shows, there were a few good souls who taped Dr Who anyway. Then a decade or so later BBC said oooops! they'd destroyed all the early Dr Who tapes. So they made a worldwide appeal to people who might have (illegal) recordings of Dr Who so that Beeb could restore their collection. Many people came forth to help out and freely gave copies to Beeb. Does anybody else see the irony here? It seems that Beeb doesn't. *sigh*
The only thing you learn from history is that nobody ever learns from history.
I dug through the source of the page, found the files (a minor annoyance) and downloaded them, but they won't play locally for some reason. I may eventually work out how to do it, but I am not really a big fan of Dr Who -- I was interested mainly from a historical perspective -- so if it is too hard I just won't bother and the stupid files can just go unwatched. I've got better things to do with my time.
What, I wonder, is the point of all this anti-copying protection on files that are meant for free distribution in the first place? And where would Dr Who be if the anti-copying nuts had got their way years ago? Back in the early days of video recorders when the broadcasting companies were baying for blood in an attempt to prevent people taping TV shows, there were a few good souls who taped Dr Who anyway. Then a decade or so later BBC said oooops! they'd destroyed all the early Dr Who tapes. So they made a worldwide appeal to people who might have (illegal) recordings of Dr Who so that Beeb could restore their collection. Many people came forth to help out and freely gave copies to Beeb. Does anybody else see the irony here? It seems that Beeb doesn't. *sigh*
The only thing you learn from history is that nobody ever learns from history.