BBC iPlayer
Today we got the BBC TV-on-demand internet player working, iPlayer. It has taken the two of us an hour and a half to get it to the stage where it will download a program, and I'm pretty experienced with computer and that's what G- does for a living. I think they need to work on ease of use.
First up, you have to be using Windows XP, IE6 or higher and Windows Media Player 10 or higher. First of all, after signing in, I had to set IE as my default browser (although they didn't mention that it also had to be the default), even though I was already using it. Secondly, I had to update Media Player to 11, which hung my computer for a little while, but eventually worked. At no point in the installation instructions and error messages did it say that you had to do these two things.
Once that was sorted, I started again and logged in, and tried to download a program. Now it prompts you to install the iPlayer Media Library, which is a separate little program. Here I encountered another problem: C:\Documents and Settings\My Documents\All Users\Documents was not accessible - apparently I didn't have permission so installation couldn't continue. I am administrator and have full priveledges, so this was a bit of a mystery. After much poking around and investigating, G- was able to use a command line utility to change the access priveledges on the folder - the main part of it is now working, but it wouldn't act recursively, so the other stuff it is still partly broken. This was not iPlayer's fault, to be fair, but I'm not the only one to have encountered this problem. Once it was installed, it kept flicking up an error that it was running out of space on drive C every 2 seconds, which made it difficult to reset the library location to the external drive, but once I got that, it settled down.
So then I went back to iPlayer on the net and tried to download a program, but first had to create a BBC online identity, separate from my iPlayer login identity. Once done, I tried to download a program again but got an error message about a security update and it said to contact support. But after investigating the forums, it turned out all it needed was a Windows Update to support the Digital Rights Management they were using, which was easily obtained and fixed from Windows Updates.
It's playing fine. A word of advice though - play them in Windows Media Player stand-alone rather than the iPlayer window (there a link to go to stand-alone in the window) - the iPlayer window uses 99% CPU to play a program, Media Player stand-alone only uses about 30%. The picture is probably not too far off DVD quality.
First up, you have to be using Windows XP, IE6 or higher and Windows Media Player 10 or higher. First of all, after signing in, I had to set IE as my default browser (although they didn't mention that it also had to be the default), even though I was already using it. Secondly, I had to update Media Player to 11, which hung my computer for a little while, but eventually worked. At no point in the installation instructions and error messages did it say that you had to do these two things.
Once that was sorted, I started again and logged in, and tried to download a program. Now it prompts you to install the iPlayer Media Library, which is a separate little program. Here I encountered another problem: C:\Documents and Settings\My Documents\All Users\Documents was not accessible - apparently I didn't have permission so installation couldn't continue. I am administrator and have full priveledges, so this was a bit of a mystery. After much poking around and investigating, G- was able to use a command line utility to change the access priveledges on the folder - the main part of it is now working, but it wouldn't act recursively, so the other stuff it is still partly broken. This was not iPlayer's fault, to be fair, but I'm not the only one to have encountered this problem. Once it was installed, it kept flicking up an error that it was running out of space on drive C every 2 seconds, which made it difficult to reset the library location to the external drive, but once I got that, it settled down.
So then I went back to iPlayer on the net and tried to download a program, but first had to create a BBC online identity, separate from my iPlayer login identity. Once done, I tried to download a program again but got an error message about a security update and it said to contact support. But after investigating the forums, it turned out all it needed was a Windows Update to support the Digital Rights Management they were using, which was easily obtained and fixed from Windows Updates.
It's playing fine. A word of advice though - play them in Windows Media Player stand-alone rather than the iPlayer window (there a link to go to stand-alone in the window) - the iPlayer window uses 99% CPU to play a program, Media Player stand-alone only uses about 30%. The picture is probably not too far off DVD quality.