iPlayer Updates Bring Better Quality
Apr6
It would seem that the BBC iPlayer has just undergone a huge update, with many of the Labs features now making it into release.
The big headline feature is of course HD – some iPlayer programmes are now available in true 1280×720 HD quality (providing you have a beefy enough network, 3.2mbps to be exact). Apparently the BBC HD people were very exacting about what would and would not meet their standards, and iPlayer have finally managed to find the right combination as well as satisfied their own requirement of getting a cross-platform application working.
Secondly, but quite cool, is the variable bitrate feature. This means that the streaming player will start out with the highest bandwidth version of the video (replacing the old high/standard quality button) and will turn itself down should it encounter streaming problems until it can stream reliably. Also gone are the big/medium/small size buttons, replaced by a single ’switch size’ button which alternates between small and big video, and tweaks the bandwidth version accordingly.
The iPlayer Diagnostic has a look at PAVCON.
You can now also get iPlayer to run a connection diagnostic to see what you can and can’t get on your current connection, something you’re prompted to do if the streaming detects that you don’t have sufficient bandwidth. Running this from behind PAVCON provides the expected response – I can barely scrape streaming the lowest possible TV quality, providing I’m not doing anything else with the network. However, next year with a nice chunky connection I should be able to stream some HD goodness.
Finally, but by no means least importantly, the iPlayer Desktop is now out of beta and is the official application for getting iPlayer content on Windows, OS X or Linux. This conveniently cross-platform application is powered by Adobe Air and finally gets rid of P2P communications (which uses Evil Nasty Horrible Illegal Content-Stealing BitTorrent, and is subsequently blocked all over the place) as well as supporting the new HD content and fixing lots of bugs.
All in all, I like it and look forwards to the advances in iPlayer v3 this summer.
23:36 on April 20th, 2009
Ouch. Even I got 800kbps at Hayes Wharf.
Pavcon much be slow as hell!
15:01 on April 23rd, 2009
Man. I just discovered my ethernet connection has been running on 100mbps mode even though I only pay for 10! Only 16.5 makes it to the BBC though. Now if some other people in college would only use it I could watch a little bit of HD without being slapped with a huge fine!
10:41 on April 24th, 2009
What the hell is this PAVCON nonsense, I thought students were blessed with a high-speed connection to JANET.
Selling students piss-poor internet access sounds like a proper scam to me!
11:35 on April 24th, 2009
It depends where you live. Students in university provided accommodation get a hookup to JANET, although it’s only provided over 100Mbps networking. Since I’m in privately owned accommodation I get whatever they provide.
I’ll go see how it behaves on campus and post another test.
16:03 on April 24th, 2009
A terrible shame you don’t get access to JANET. It really is the most awesome network I’ve used.
Still, you can download HD at Uni and watch at home I guess!