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The BBC iPlayer is finally coming to Sky, with the two agreeing a partnership that will see the UK's biggest video on demand service land on the popular satellite platform, along with more content from ITV.
iPlayer is now a familiar sight on set top boxes, including those of Sky's cable-based rival Virgin Media, and this is a major step for both Sky and the BBC.
With a UK launch date of 'later this year' the iPlayer will be arriving in 'up to five million Sky homes'.
The service will run on the Anytime+ IPTV within the Sky platform, although the satellite giant has had to shift its policy to find a partnership with the BBC.
Previously, Anytime+ was limited to people with Sky Broadband but that is now to be opened out to anyone with a broadband connection that wants to connect it up to their satellite box.
"A core BBC value is to reach all audiences on a universal basis, so Sky's plan to make Anytime+ available to customers regardless of their Internet provider is an important development in helping to bring BBC iPlayer to around 5 million new homes in 2012 – at no extra charge," explained the press release.
BBC's iPlayer is not only the biggest VOD service in the UK, but has served as a major trailblazer for television over an internet connection on a global level.
One of the Sky service's obvious gaps was the lack of BBC content on its catch up tool, and there will be delight within the company that a partnership has been reached.
"Having the BBC and Sky work together to further build on the BBC iPlayer success story can only be fantastic news for audiences," said BBC Director General Mark Thompson.
"Making BBC iPlayer available on all platforms is key to our commitment to universal access and this agreement takes us one step further towards that goal.
"I'm delighted to take this first step on a story of innovation for both organisations."
Jeremy Darroch, Sky's chief executive, added, "Sky Anytime+ will go from strength to strength in 2012 and we are delighted that the addition of BBC iPlayer will allow Sky customers to enjoy the best of the BBC whenever they want."
Although the iPlayer will inevitably steal the headlines, the arrival of more ITV content (from tomorrow) is also significant as Sky looks to compete with new on-demand rivals like Netflix.
Within the main Anytime+ menu, there will be a dedicated ITV Player section some of Britain's best loved shows - including Cold Feet, Prime Suspect and Lewis - will be available on demand.
It's a red-letter day for UK VOD with the potential that five million homes will take up the chance to watch both ITV and BBC content by the end of the year.
And it sends a clear message to the likes of Netflix, Lovefilm, Google TV and YouView that Sky believes it can remain a dominant force in British television.
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Have you been holding onto that 10-year-old workhorse that saw you through college, in the hope that one day you'll be able to put it to good use? If you're like us, you've probably cannibalised most of its peripherals and all that's left is its tiny processor and a meagre amount of RAM.
It might not be able to run any bleeding edge OS, but you can use it as a centralised file server to download and share files on your network and the web.
Follow the walkthrough below to install the Torrent Server appliance and bring your server online.
Once you have it running on your remote headless server, fire up a browser and point it to the IP address of the server. The control panel of the Torrent Server has five icons that point to the five major components of the appliance.
The 'Basic' icon takes you to the P2P-GUI interface. This is simpler than MLDonkey's default interface, which can be intimating to first-time users. You can get to it via the 'Advanced' icon.
Another speciality of this appliance is the browser-based file manager eXtplorer, which you can use to manipulate files and directories, as well as their permissions.
Web Shell fires up an AJAX-based terminal emulator called Shell in a Box, which you can use to log into your remote server from your web browser.
Finally, there's Webmin for CLI-averse users. Webmin is a web-based configuration tool that you can use to control all aspects of your remote server, such as setting up a cron job, reading logs, managing running processes and so on.
All these components are pre-configured out of the box. For example, MLDonkey has all file-sharing protocols enabled, including HTTP, FTP, and BitTorrent. Besides these visible elements, there are also additional useful components that work in the background. For example, there's the Samba file server, which ensures that you can access your server easily from Windows PCs.
On Windows, you'll find the remote server listed as TORRENTSERVER under Network in My Computer. You can log into the server using the credentials of the user 'root' that you set during installation. This lets you easily drag and drop files into the remote server. The default storage directory in the server is /srv/storage.
Downloading and controlling torrents on the remote server is straightforward. But you can also use MLDonkey to seed your own torrents. The only real downside is that its interface isn't anything like those of the popular desktop torrent clients.
Once you get a hang of it though, you'll be able to appreciate its flexibility. Let's familiarise ourselves with MLDonkey and its pre-configured download/ upload directories.
The Torrent Server appliance we have set-up comes with MLDonkey pre-configured. To review its settings, head to its Advanced interface from the Control Panel. Now click 'Help+ > Sysinfo' to bring up the configuration information.
MLDonkey can also be controlled via its own set of commands, so you can also access the configuration option simply by entering 'sysinfo' in the text box in the main interface.
The default directories are listed at the bottom of the page. MLDonkey is installed under /var/lib/mldonkey. That directory houses all the configuration files for all the different protocols. So for example, bittorrent.ini houses all the config options for MLDonkey's BitTorrent client.
With MLDonkey you can seed either individual files (like some-distro.iso) or a group of files housed under a directory (like the_best_distros/). To seed individual files, keep them under the /var/lib/ mldonkey/incoming/files directory. Similarly, seeded directories must be placed under /var/lib/mldonkey/ incoming/directories.
You can move or copy the files from their original location to these directories in several ways. You can upload them to the remote server using the browser-based file manager, or by accessing it via Samba.
To move the files around in the remote server you can either use the web shell, or you can log into the remote server via ssh using the command ssh root@<server- IP-address>.
Before you can seed the local files you need to create a .torrent file. To create a .torrent file, you need a tracker that will announce its presence to other peers. By default, MLDonkey will use the IP address of the server it's running on to track torrents within the local network.
To use an external tracker, you'll have to modify MLDonkey's configuration. The simplest way to do this is to head to 'Client settings' in the basic interface and look for the 'bt-default_tracker' entry. By default it's empty, which means it'll use the local tracker.
To point it to an external tracker, enter its location in the space provided – for example, http://linuxtracker.org:2710/announce, which is the tracker for LinuxTracker.org. Now use the compute_ torrent command to point to the files you need to seed.
For example, compute_torrent/srv/storage/incoming/files/some-distro.iso will generate its .torrent file with the tracker information you've specified in the configuration file. The generated .torrent file is kept under the /var/lib/mldonkey/torrents/seeded directory.
You can confirm that your torrents are being seeded by going to 'Transfers > Uploads'. To view more details about a torrent, click the 'Details' link under the Status column. That's it. Now you can download files unattended and earn brownie points from your peers by serving torrents.
1. Run the live CD
You can either install the Torrent Server appliance directly, or try its components by first running it in live mode. The installer is a modified Debian installer. Unless you know what you're doing, let the installer partition the disk for you.
2. Set passwords
Whether you install the appliance or run it in live mode, you'll be prompted for password to the root user as well as to the 'admin' user for the various components in the appliance: the MLDonkey filesharing app, the P2P-GUI to MLDonkey, and the eXtplorer file manager.
3. Server's up
That's all there is to it. Once you've configured the users, the appliance will copy all the files and install the boot loader as well. After restarting, it will boot to the configuration console, which lists all the addresses for accessing the various apps in the server.
Flesh out any TurnKey appliance
1. Refresh package lists
Log in to the server's control panel and click on the 'Webmin' icon and log in using the credentials of user root. In Webmin, go to 'System > Software packages'. Scroll down to the bottom of this page, toggle the 'Re-synchronize package list' radio button and click the 'Upgrade now' button.
2. Install packages
After the package lists have been refreshed, you can search for packages you want to install from the top of this page. This will list all the packages in Ubuntu's repository that match your search string, and you can select packages you wish to install (and later uninstall).
3. Install from the CLI
Power users can also use the web shell to install packages. After logging into the server from the web shell as root, first refresh the package lists with apt-get update and then install the packages you want with apt-get install <package-name>, just like you would on a regular Ubuntu installation.
With the torrent server installed, it's time to put it to work
1. Log in to the server
Head to the Torrent server by entering its IP address in a web browser from any computer on the same network as the server. This will bring up the Control Panel. Click on the 'Basic' icon and login using the user 'admin' and password that you specified during setup.
2. Connect to the torrent server
Now you are in the simpler of the two interfaces for the MLDonkey file sharing app. The first thing you have to do is to connect to your MLDonkey instance. For that head to the 'Clients' tab and click on the 'Connect' button next to the server running on 127.0.0.1:4001.
3. Client settings
To configure MLDonkey's BitTorrent settings, head to the 'Client settings' tab and then click the 'BitTorrent' link. From here you can alter settings such as the default tracker (which is useful when creating torrents), the number of peers to request from a tracker and lots more.
4. Download torrent
Once you've connected with the server, browse to your favourite torrent website and copy the link to the .torrent file you wish to download. In the basic interface, click the 'Links' tab, paste the URL in the text box and click the 'Load link' button to load the torrent.
5. Control the download
Torrents that are in the process of being downloaded are listed under the 'Download' tab, along with various pieces of information such as total size, download progress and ETA. You also have buttons to pause and resume each torrent, and set their individual priority.
6. Download completed files
Once a torrent has been downloaded, it's scanned by the inbuilt ClamAV antivirus scanner (which updates its antivirus signatures automatically). After being cleared, the files are placed under /var/lib/mldonkey/incoming, from where you can download them to any machine.
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