Well I tried, I really did, but after struggling for 4 hours the BBC iPlayer was uninstalled (which took 30 minutes minimum). My thoughts then (without screen shots obviously)
- The iPlayer uses the same Kontiki P2P system that Sky Everywhere and 4 On Demand uses. The same components that everyone complains about as there’s no way to throttle bandwidth.
Nor can I see anywhere the BBC warns you about this (Sky eventually started to). So if you’re on a limited ISP connection (of which there are many in the UK) you may quickly run out of your bandwidth allowance because the sharing is done in the background. I guess it was too much to hope for that the BBC would learn from their rivals who have been doing this for over a year. - More worrying is that there is no way to throttle CPU on Kontiki. If you’re downloading a program that hasn’t many peers (I choose a Dr Who episode, watching the bandwidth showed it being pulled from a single source, I assume the seeding server and no uploading at all) then the software runs fine but as soon as you pull from multiple sources the CPU usage rises. And rises. And rises. To 99% for over an hour trying to pull the Top Gear Arctic Special. That’s simply not acceptable. There was so much CPU usage there was no way to cancel the downloads, the UI was totally non-responsive. It took Task Manager and the killing of both the client and the Kontiki servce (kservice.exe) to get my machine back. As soon as the BBC client starts up again there goes your CPU, so no way to cancel the downloads in progress. My machine got worrying hot.
- Slashdot et al are full of complaints about the DRM being Windows only. What they haven’t reported is that you are forced to use IE. For some bizarre reason the download catalogue is a web page which uses ActiveX to interact with the client on your machine. So no Firefox support. The content selector on the web page is bland; and there’s very little content there. The client itself uses web pages to control it’s settings, a "smart" client at its worst.
- As ever the Kontiki service is left installed and running when you uninstall. Not acceptable, although unlike Sky the BBC uninstaller does remove it’s content and doesn’t continue sharing it after you’ve uninstalled the client. (Sky provide a partial KService uninstaller however it leaves the firewall entries it created in the Windows firewall [Check for an exception for Delivery Manager Service and delete it] and some directories and content [Look for and delete C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Documents\My Deliveries\]). Poor Tim Anderson seems to have hope KClean does everything, but doesn’t mention if he actually found it.
- Of course some complain about the DRM aspect; it worked for me and I find the whole "DRM is evils" attitude utterly stupid as the BBC is constrained by both the content owners and their charter, the idea of some American zealot trying to force a British institution to follow their politics is as distasteful as the US government forcing the UK government to follow their lead. Oh, damn, that means it’ll happen then.) I find the lack of Vista support amusing; the BBC hints that it’s problems with the DRM, but of course the Windows Media DRM is the same between Vista and XP. I get the feeling the problem is probably with that awful P2P component and the ActiveX control it uses, but it’s easier to blame Microsoft.
- You’re forced to use your C drive. The BBC help says
If you need to move the programmes to a different directory or drive, BBC iPlayer may have problems playing them and they may not appear in your Library.
Why? I have no problem playing DRMed material off a network drive; why is the BBC iPlayer special? - When you play the files the player puts them in a tiny window, with awful resolutions. If you open them in Media Player it looks good. You cannot set this as the default behaviour.
- The metadata in the files is from the Encoder, and is the same in every file. Way to make your library searchable.
Utterly horrible if you attempt to download a popular program, which most people will be doing. I know that google release things into Beta with the meaning of "no support, but hey it works", the BBC seem to have redefined Beta as "shut up and take the bad code; we promised this ages ago, and management is giving us crap, so we’re pushing out something that barely works and will steal your bandwidth, CPU and probably give you mumps". Epic fail.