BBC iPlayer for iPhone and iPod Touch is iGo
You've got to pick a pocket device or two
Agentless Backup is Not a Myth
The BBC's streaming iPlayer for Apple's iPod Touch and iPhone has today gone live in beta.
As promised last month, the release marks the resurgent iPlayer's first foray onto mobile devices. Some programmes that are available on the desktop haven't made the leap to your pocket yet, but we're promised it's just a matter of time.
We've had a quick look on our iPod Touch via the office Wi-Fi, and it's the closest thing to watchable mobile TV we've yet seen, so thumbs up from us. The video is 400Kb/s H.264, while audio runs as a 116Kb/s AAC stream.
It's worth noting again the BBC's deal with The Cloud means there'll be free access across thousands of public locations too. More details here. iPhone users are in the same position as iPod Touch owners: the EDGE data network is too slow for iPlayer to work.
iPlayer bigwig Anthony Rose has the lowdown on the development process and the headaches of transcoding into several formats ("50 rack-mount PCs, most of which are running really fast dual quad-core Xeon CPUs") here.
He's also soliciting votes on which devices the team should set their sights on next. ®
COMMENTS
@Richard
Not to criticise your use of time, but isn't the point of mythtv that it records what you want to see from TV - thus rendering a plugin to access iplayer kind of moot - i f you wanted to watch it, myth would have scheduled it to record, no? Thats how my myth handles everything.
And then you'd get it in lovely high(ish) bitrate MPEG-2.
Still, I suppose if you forgot to schedule something...
Doesn't it look utter crap on a decent sized TV? It must look utter pap scaled up to 1920x1200..
What about the other devices worth using?
As my title suggests - it would be better if the less moronic, cash-happy folks of the UK using proper phones (i.e. anything but the iPhake) would have similar functionality. Quite happy to use it via WiFi on my W960.
Re: TV on a phone?
Well, I find that when you've got no option but to wait for whatever reason, on a bus, train, in a queue for the post office, WHY, then access to live BBC news 24, or NASA tv, or ebaums world, tends to make the experience less of a waste of time. Of course, these are not iplayer based, but neither are they region restricted and drm loaded.
Mind you, I don't have an iphone, nor do I need one. My 3G capable HTC Trinity does me just fine thanks. And you would probably be surprised how many locations you can get HDSPA at. Remote areas of wales and cornwall are the most recent I've experienced. Plus with a 1 gig / month soft limit from T-Mobile, the data required doesn't hurt either.
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Agentless Backup is Not a Myth
