Streaming BBC iPlayer Stinks
December 17, 2007 – 2:27 pmSo, I thought I’d give the iPlayer from the BBC a try. It comes in two flavors: A downloadable application and a Flash player version. The downloadable version is Windows only, so I had to try the Flash version.
I was impressed by the ease of accessing the actual shows. All you have to do it navigate to the page and click on a show to start watching the most recent episode.
Unfortunately, starting the show is all I could do. No matter which shows I tried to watch, they all ended about three to five minutes in with a message that there was a problem playing the video.
So, once again, in an effort to protect the rights holders from having to get off their butts and innovate, we’ve got yet another video site that doesn’t work as well as bittorrent.
Oh well, maybe next time…
2 Responses to “Streaming BBC iPlayer Stinks”
I’ve had the same problem a few times (Firefox 2.0.0.10 in Fedora8) although it’s inconsistent. Tried the latest beta of Firefox 3 and that seems to alleviate things. Can’t go fullscreen then, but you pays your money…
By Andy Dixon on Jan 1, 2008
Interesting. It’s good that it actually works in Firefox 3. I think I was probably using Safari at the time.
Of course, if they’d simply let people download the shows in a well supported format, they wouldn’t now be spending all of their efforts catering for the myriad browsers/platforms/architectures in the world…
By Mark on Jan 1, 2008