• I have a new computer, in fact, I have a considerably more powerful computer.
• The BBC have had time to get criticised (a lot) by different people (also a lot) and hopefully get their act together.
• The BBC are beta testing a ‘High Quality’ version.

So, let’s look at what we said last time.

Good

• No advertisements (other than a brief channel trailer which doesn’t really count).
• Good quality, especially for so called ‘standard definition’.
• Generally fast play.
• Done with flash, pretty much universal.

Bad

• Bandwidth heavy.
• No live viewing.
• Some issues with the video.
• Only seven days of watching time.
• Awful problems with full screen play.

The thing is that I now have a computer which is almost as good as my Dad’s media machine. This means that I can experiment more, but it doesn’t mean that I have something more powerful than the box I tested it on before (although the screen is a tad smaller).

However, Auntie has had a chance to get her act together and upgrade/advance the iPlayer. This seems to have resulted in some serious interface changes and the new high definition version.

I don’t have time to write a full review at the moment but here’s my summary:

Bad to good

• With the introduction of the HD version bandwidth seems to have dropped for the non-HD media, unfortunately so has quality (see below).
• Since my last exploration I’ve found some programs and libraries which allow iPlayer downloading.
• It would seem that more and more applications are supporting the iPlayer (Boxee and XBMC).

Good to bad

• The quality before HD was very good on normal recordings. It would seem that with HD’s introduction the SD (standard definition) media is lower quality and in general more flaky.

New bad

• Over the last few weeks I’ve encountered a few video bugs, mostly involving jerks or artifacts.
• Occasionally the video decides to scramble audio and play at ten times speed, similar things happened before but this is worse.
• I’ve started to notice that very little of the audio is normalised, I have to adjust my amp a lot.
• Contrast and brightness differences, hitting ‘auto calibrate’ a lot on my screen isn’t much fun.

New good

• The HD version is very nice and the content very crisp.
• There is a growing number of devices which support the iPlayer.
• The ability to pause, then resume the next time you open your browser (it remembers where you were), a small but important improvement.
• Wider range of Programme avaliability.
• I can generally get jerk-less full screen playback on my box. I have yet to purchase a non-integrated graphics card so this is impressive (I have a NVIDIA internal at the moment).

Still good

• No advertisements. Even with things like Heroes there are no advertisements, the most you get is a channel/producer trailer.
• Audio on both SD and HD is crisp and clear.
• Generally very good avaliability.
• Generally fast play.
• Good support for most normal computers.

Still bad

• No live viewing that I can find.
• Limited time to watch.
• Strange problems with full screen, sometimes on some computers with some definitions. They’ve certainly fixed it for some situations.

I think that  covers just about everything, feel free to comment with your own opinions.

Kind regards, Robert.

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.