Play “videos” on your Kindle with the iPlayer

If for whatever reason, you wished that the Kindle could play videos, it turns out that short of waiting for Amazon to come out with a new version of Kindle, it’s not entirely impossible, thanks to a developer at the BBC, Mark Longstaff-Tyrrell.

What he did was he combined the broadcaster’s popular iPlayer video streaming service together with some software, and through the use closed captioning, he came up with what he calls, the iPlayer for Kindle.

What the iPlayer does is it takes DVB digital television and the accompanying subtitles, together with any frame that has dialogue involved and puts them together. To make it slightly more fluid, the software will then go through and take out some extra frames to combine with the dialogue frames, to show things like movement. It then takes the finished product and converts it to an HTML file, which can then be converted into the PDF format for “watching” on your Kindle device. If you think about it, it’s sort of like reading an animated comic strip, or watching stop motion animation.

It’s definitely far from perfect, as certain parts of the show will not always come with subtitles, which means, various bits of the show’s plot might be lost in “translation”, but it’s a pretty novel idea, probably great for Kindle users who must have “video” on their devices.

I don’t know about you guys, but I think I’d rather wait for the next generation of Kindle.