iPlayer on JANET
May0
In my recent post about BBC iPlayer and the fact that PAVCON was abysmally bad at streaming I promised to do a comparison of the network where I currently reside against the behemoth that is JANET. For those who don’t know JANET is the network behind most academia in the UK, and is blazingly fast.
Well, I finally remembered to do this test whilst I was in the labs today, so here are the results.
iPlayer on JANET
I think that should suffice for watching TV. A curious fact though is that the PCs provided by the university are woefully underpowered for actually watching HD TV, lacking sufficient clout to actually decrypt and render the stream at any more than a couple of frames a second.
So, it looks like the way forwards is still beefy broadband and my laptop. bring on the new house in July.
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.
iPlayer – It’s Getting Better
Dec0
As you will probably know, the BBC iPlayer is a fantastic way to catch up on a huge variety of BBC programmes both TV and radio, from across all the channels.
However, the original version was a Windows-only download using Microsoft DRM. A bit later, the clever developers released streaming versions using Flash which could be streamed on Mac and Linux, but still not downloaded. Other goodies for the streaming version were released later during a major site upgrade, including higher quality streaming, last-viewed lists and the ability to resume play of videos halfway through.
Now, the developers have followed in the footsteps of other big sites by making their beta features available for the public to test, break and comment on in the form of the iPlayer Labs. Initial features included recommendations based on what other people have watched, and resizable views without opening a new window. I’ve not seen anything go ‘wrong’ with Labs features, so I’d recommend signing up to be a tester.
Finally, announced today, the Labs include a downloadable iPlayer for Mac and Linux in the form of the BBC iPlayer Desktop, based on Adobe AIR. This is going to replace the old download manager on Windows as soon as it leaves beta, means the iPlayer is fully functional on any platform which can run Adobe Flash, and is much nicer to use than the old player.
Just in time for Christmas. Awesome.