Have you tried the BBC iPlayer yet? I just installed it the other day to watch the Extras again and I’m pretty impressed. I know many people haven’t been too bowled over by it for various reasons and the Opensource Community was not happy that they couldn’t use it on Linux. You have to install the Download Manager and then you can download a programme from the last 7 days. If you don’t start watching it, then you have 30 days but if you start watching it then you have 7 days before the file is automatically deleted. The Extras was 400MB to download which on my broadband link took just over an hour (approx 100 kbytes/sec). The downloads are performed using a peer-to-peer technology called Kontiki which until I searched for it, didn’t realise it was owned by Verisign. As it’s a P2P network your computer can be used as a download “Peer Source” if you so choose. The content is pretty high quality so playing it full screen makes for a good experience.
Filed under Technology
Technorati Tags: BBC iPlayer,The Extras
Posted
by vijay on Sunday, December 30th, 2007
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December 30th, 2007 at 5:57 pm
I’ve just tried watching “Dara O’Briain - Live At The Theatre Royal” using Mozilla Firefox and iPlayer informed me that downloads were only available in Internet Explorer. However, the player then started streaming the show for me to watch immediately within the web-page without waiting for any large download! Video quality is excellent. Thumbs up!
December 30th, 2007 at 6:13 pm
You’re right you can stream it as well. They use ActiveX for the download manager which is why that part doesn’t work with Firefox. I think the Streaming Player is Flash based so that it could be used on Linux, etc. I’d be interested in the streaming protocols/codecs they are using if anyone knows?
December 30th, 2007 at 7:34 pm
I recently tried the BBC iPlayer and was also very impressed. I initially installed it on my old HP laptop and it ran very badly even though it featured 1GB of RAM. The graphics card was what was letting it down. Running on a higher spec machine cured the problem.
Overall its a very good application but it could be improved by allowing on-demand streaming of past and live broadcasts.
Kieran.
December 30th, 2007 at 8:24 pm
I wonder if we’ll get streaming of Live programmes? I suppose it has to come sometime.
January 1st, 2008 at 2:40 pm
Just found out that you can actually stream programs without having to download. Although the quality is not as good due to it being encoded in Adobe Flash Player.
Kieran.