Triple play and Video
The biggest ISPs in France offer now Triple-Play DSL offers, with unlimited phone, ATM Bandwidth > 20Mbits and TV on your box and/or computer for something about 30 euros/months. But they also permit you to watch your TV channels on your computer with VLC, with different results…
Freeplayer and TVsurPC
Free
Free has always had a strong interaction with VLC, with their multiposte and streaming back from your PC to your TV. Their freeplayer and the strong community associated shows that they use VLC almost everywhere, cool.
They have launched since a few days/weeks a mean for the people that are far from their DSLAM and have a slower connexion, which is a webpage using VLC plugin: Freebox. This is cool and they use the latest VLC possible.
Neuf/Cegetel
Neuf has add different techniques (for Cegetel, for Club-Internet, for AOL-fr and for themselves) and they are trying to level everything.
They lacked the TV on PC feature, but a few weeks ago they showed the TV sur PC
Orange
Orange has always been in the deny that you can have your TV channels on your TV, and claim you can’t do it with their technical solution which is totally false. Know more about this .
Thoughts and reflexions
So, you would think, that I am glad they use those technologies (VLC media player)….
I am, I mean it, however, I think they are not so cool: let me explain.
Neuf
I will start with Neuf, which is easier.
Contacts and Mirror
Neuf never proposed any mirror or any help to the team, which is not so nice. No sponsor or anything… But well, business is business… Still I would have love that they finance some VLC improvements (PAFF decoding?)
VLC version
They are distributing VLC on their website. First they use an outdated version (0.8.6b) that does not work on Vista, but maybe they don’t care about those Vista consumers… Then they don’t use our official link for downloading, so we can’t count the statistics of VLC downloads and some of our binaries where broken, so they don’t repercute the changes.
Help and contact
Just to finish, it is almost impossible to contact the neuf.fr team to speak with them… Last, but not least, they use “VideoLan Client” in their Help system, which is not the correct name of the product and don’t even show any link to our Website… :D
Free
Free people are nice, I just wished they give us back the download statistics for VLC, since they used to be a big link to download the player…
Recording
Anyway, some ISPs claim that you can’t record the streams on your computer using their system… This is a blatant lie and doing so is not hacking anything.
Final thoughts.
Well, don’t get me wrong, I am pretty glad to have all that in France with our ISPs, but it was just to express some limitations.