Robert Small, The blog thereof.

I think most people who’ve been following the iPlayer in any depth have noticed that it’s not really delivering. It has some good sides, but there are a fair few things that I’d like to take issue with.

I would not say it’s been a complete waste of money, it hasn’t. It provides videos to anyone within a certain part of the desktop market’s spectrum. So, what’s bad about it? Primarily, you may not download the videos if you’re on anything other than Windows. Isn’t this government backing of a monopoly? Annoyingly the online viewing is only available for 6 days, and even if you do find that old XP disk you’ll only be able to keep the videos for 30 days. So much for asking your neighbours to download a year’s worth of East Enders for you while you’re off on that gap year in Tibet.

So, if you use Linux and you’re away from a computer for more than 7 days, tough.

It does provide some good quality video, the screen shot above shows a similar quality to what you’ll generally get. How much of a good thing is this though? If we dub this ‘high definition’, where’s the standard definition or low definition version for those of us on slower and more expensive connections?

Whatever codec they’re using (I haven’t researched, maybe someone can fill me in) seems to be quite high on the bandwidth usage. They also don’t seem to be using the standard method of scaling videos; normally videos will scale nicely to full screen on any of my computers (on youtube and the like), iPlayer doesn’t. I get skips, jumps, hops and judders if I try to full screen it. I’ve tested it on this machine (1.7GHz, 1GB), my other laptop (1.6GHz, 2GB), and my dad’s media machine (2x 2.6GHz, 2GB). All had problems.

It also has a habit of killing itself out of the blue. This generally manifests itself in one of several ways:

• ‘There has been a problem playing this video…’ This tends to happen when you walk away for a while and then come back.
• ‘Undefined undefined undefined’ This has only ever happened once, but I presume heavier users get it more often.
• The jitters. This is when suddenly everything goes jittery, something like a deliberate echo 0.5s after and at the same volume.
• The express joo-jars. An apt nickname for when it goes into super fast mode and does something weird with the sound.

In general it behaves, but I’ve noticed a few other distinct problems:

• Incomplete uploads. An absolute curse, generally it will finish just before the bit which finalises the whole program.
• Time delay. For some reason they seem to forget to upload half the days programs for a while, perfectly OK until you want to watch one which is missing.

All in all though, it’s not all bad. I’ll try a comparison with a competitor, ITV’s catchup.

Downloads: [BBC] Yes, only Windows and for 30 days. [ITV] No, or invisible.

Video quality: High, sharp and generally smooth. Nasty.

Adverts: None, just a channel trailer at the beginning. Lots.

Requirements: Flash and a browser. Internet Explorer, a ‘patched’ Windows Media Player, ActiveX.

Speed: Fast. Slow to start with then seems to be buffered and OK.

Watching live: No known mechanism. Possible, reasonable quality.

At the end of the day, does it let me watch Dr Who? Yes, therefore it can’t be all bad.

Kind regards, Robert.