This is rather strange. Recently I’ve noticed the BBC will not let me watch any video content site with Firefox 3 beta 5 on Ubuntu. Now I know this is not a country based issue, I live in the UK. Secondly, I know it is not an issue with my ISP that makes me look like I am accessing the content from abroad. How do I know this? Simple, by switching user agents.

First I clear my cookies and try to watch a video, say one of Fabio Capello’s crazy interviews in English, the site greets me with the following message:
“Sorry this content is not available at the moment”

Now, if you’ve had ISP issues before with the BBC’s site you will know that if your ISP has acrazy routing scheme up the BBC site will give you the following message:
“Sorry this content is not available in your country”

Notice the difference?

Now all I have to do to watch the video is clear my cookies once more and use the User Agent Switcher plug-in for Firefox to gain access. Simply switch the agent to crappy old Internet Explorer on Windows Vista and enjoy the videos…

Well done Hull for their victory over Bristol in the Championship play off final! The Premiership is going to be full of underdogs or historically ’smaller’ clubs next year; thus, it should be really interesting at the bottom of the table. Looking forward to the Leeds Doncaster game tomorrow too; although, revision might just get in the way! I tried to read throughout the match… and it didn’t really turn out so well. Fifteen pages in 90 minutes isn’t really progress!

Oh, the BBC have some new kids show called ‘Meta4orce’ on their homepage. Now I get the idea with the number 4 being used instead of just calling the program Metaforce, like ‘2 Fast 2 Furious’; however, it looks like the shows creators have made a little mistake. The way it currently is, the title would be pronounced Meta-four-orce; now I doubt that was the intended pronunciation!

As you may notice, this is do follow blog. So I feel it is my duty to point you to a nice list of do follow blogs.

If your just starting out with your blog, getting your site on these lists is one essential move. Of course, content and relevant links are still important; but posting a few useful comments on other blogs, that aren’t spammy will help get visitors to your site. So first you will want to get your site on such a list of blogs, getting your site on one will probably mean your site will appear on a number of concatenated lists on other sites — that’s a few nice free links! Then use them to post a few useful and informative comments on relevant sites to your own. The search engines will give relevant links more weight; and users are more likely to visit a relevant page to the one they are on.

Only one more exam left too

 Update:

I thought the flickering problem was fixed, but there is a caveat. With Compiz watching videos under VLC and Xine the video flickers, but under SMPlayer, using X11 output the flicker is gone. The X11 output is the same quality as the XVideo or OpenGL output of other players; although, I would presume it takes more resources.

After upgrading to Ubuntu Hardy Xine crashed with two nasty errors: X Error of failed request… and option glx-shm does not exist. In addition to this, VLC output was blocky and I could not force VLC to work correctly with OpenGL simply changing the output method to OpenGL would crash VLC on startup. This is probably an issue users of modern ATi graphics cards will have, as the drivers aren’t really all that.

So here’s how to get Ubuntu Hardy video output sorted and have Compiz running too; as unlike Gutsy, Hardy does not fall foul of the ‘flickering video’ in Compiz. I know many people have issues with video under Compiz when using Fglrx, so this may help those people.

First, you should install Envy-Ng — you will need to configure Synaptic to use the Multiverse repository to install Envy-Ng– and let it sort out your graphics cards drivers. This program will keep your drivers uptodate and sort out your xorg.config for you. Use Envy-Ng to install the latest drivers for your card (at current Envy will install version 8-3.)You should then restart the X-Server (Ctrl-Alt-Backspace.)

Next up you will need to sort out your Xorg to run XVideo, without it being so blocky. This is due to Envy not setting the options for XVideo correctly. Open up xorg.conf with the following command in the terminal: sudo /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Now change the section “Device” to have TexturedVideoSync, TexturedVideo, and VideoOverlay on and have OpenGLOverlay off. The section should look as follows:

Section “Device”
Identifier    “aticonfig-Device[0]”
Driver        “fglrx”
Option        “TexturedVideoSync”    “on”
Option         “TexturedVideo” “on”
Option        “VideoOverlay”    “on”
Option        “OpenGLOverlay”    “off”
EndSection

You may want to check the following sections, with the following setting I get Compiz effects with no flickering video.

Section “ServerFlags”
Option        “AIGLX”    “true”
EndSection

Section “DRI”
Group        “video”
Mode    0666
EndSection

Section “Extensions”
Option        “RENDER”    “Enable”
Option        “DAMAGE”    “Enable”
Option        “XVideo”    “Enable”
Option        “Composite”    “Enable”
EndSection