BBC Flash Streaming (News, iPlayer etc)

[linuxgirlie]

So how do people do it? Since the beeb has moved over to flash streaming our system has stopped playing the videos. Now I can get flash streaming from youtube and any other website but not the bbc.

So far I have found this:

It will work going straight out on the internet bypassing proxy and firewall.
It will work going though the proxy but bypassing the firewall.
It won't go out bypassing the proxy but using the firewall.
It won't go though using the proxy and the firewall.

So it must be a firewall problem. I have nmap'd the beeb (sorry pls don't come and get me)and all other things I could think of but it hasn't helped.

I have done the following with the firewall:

Let out just the IPs of the beeb servers that I have found - didn't work
Let out the whole IP range (I know I know) - but it didn't work
Opened the ports up that the iPlayer posted to need - didn't work
Opened up all the ports I scanned - didn't work

Everything is now back to closed, but I am really getting annoyed now, as alot of staff and students use the information on the site.

Please help!!

Jo

[TechMonkey]

What actually happens?
If the player loads, it sits there for a bit and then just shows links to related clips try unfiltering/unblocking/allowing 84.53.177.150. Found the videos seem to be got from here but if this can't be reached there are no errors, it wasn't showing as being filtered or even trapped but that fixed it for me.

[linuxgirlie]

Ok, this is what happens:

1. I click on the link on bbc news
2. It loads the page with the video box in the middle
3. The video box then has a spinning circle of blobs sits like that for about 5 seconds
4. Then the page which says 'More like this' appears and I can try and replay the video which then goes back to step 2.


I just tried that IP in my firewall and it made no difference.

[markcuk]

we had a problem with byte size and flash movies..we found the bbc loads a mp3 file in the background and our filter was blocking these.

and with our curent filter its mp3 banned on/off option

mark

[linuxgirlie]

woohoo I got it working.....one slight problem

Does anyone know if the beeb own all of the 84.53.0.0 range

I had to unban the whole range (84.53.0.0/8) for it to start working, so now I will need to thin the ips down a bit.

Jo

[Geoff]

The BBC do not own any IP blocks in the 84.53.0.0/8 range.

[linuxgirlie]

Ah, well I have managed to shrink it down to:

84.53.177.0/8

So I will leave it as that for the moment and see if we get any trouble, they are still having to go though a proxy so access is recorded, but you never know, they aren't stupid students

[sidewinder]

Used to work for us, now we just get

"There seems to be a problem playing this video - please try again"

Both internally and in front of our ISA server...so I think its a LEA issue

At least you guys can solve it yourselves

[Geoff]

Found it, it's AKAMI.

84.53.128.0 - 84.53.191.255

[linuxgirlie]

Thanks geoff, they don't seem to be a company that would host dodgy stuff, but I will continue to try and track down these specific ips. I mean its down to 254 but alot of websites can be run on 254 servers

[pooley]

We have to run the isa firewall client on the desktop machines to allow streaming media through the lea's antiquated ISA 2000 box.

[dave.81]

Just to bring this back up again, we have no problem streaming the videos and the staff and really making the most of it. Now though i'm being asked to setup the iplayer download manager for them, which i have a few concerns about and just wondering what other people are doing.

1. it's p2p software
2. doesn't like working through firewalls
3. hundreds of massive files being saved around the network (600meg for an hour)

[SimpleSi]

I'd really recommend not touching the download manager - IME it wasn't a stable piece of kit (ditched it 3 months ago) and not worth the trouble.


regards

Simon

[webman]

Can you not unblock HTTP hostnames/domains instead of IPs?

Videos seem to load from avclip.bbc.co.uk. Ping response returns a dynamic-looking hostname of a102.vi5g1.akafms.net. So I would guess that whitelisting avclip.bbc.co.uk and akafms.net would allow the BBC videos to play.

[dave.81]

Thanks Simon that is my thought too, just gotta convince the DHM that i'm right and as usual she is wrong.