Something else which happened during my break from this blog was the full launch of the BBC's iPlayer. I wasn't expecting my usage of the new initiative to have been transformed by Youtube. At launch the player streams from almost any browser (I haven't tested in PC Safari) but only downloads programmes in Internet Explorer.
However, due to two years of Youtube usage, I haven't been bothered with wasting time or hard drive space downloading a programme from the iPlayer at all. I've been content to stream the desired programme on my backup machine. If anything, I've made sure that I've sat down and watched whatever television I really wanted to see, when on the big screen, because it's hard enough finding the time to watch back the non-BBC television I record, even with the luxury of zipping through the ads and keeping American shows down to 45-50 minutes and half-hour comedies at 20-25 mins.
The fact that whatever you'd watch on the iPlayer would be widescreen is useful for the factual programmes which used to have their own bbc.co.uk/ offshoots in a 4:3 panel but its full screen mode's best suited to smaller flatpanels. Up close, the encoding is necessarily naff, even on a quality CRT. It's best left to a window.
My only criticism of the iPlayer is that the Corporation should stop pretending that you can watch every single BBC Programme on it when individual decisions are taken as to which repeats it will include of programmes made before the utility's launch. The Cult Of... series as shown on BBC4 is one such programme. Even when the 60s/70s programmes under examination hailed from the BBC, and the actors were filming new pieces to camera, thereby making the clips show a totally Beeb creation, they were not in the iPlayer listings. Presumably someone in the BBC, once again, deemed science fiction as not cool enough to have any audience that wished to see quality.
Hopefully, decisions like this will not become the norm and it's heartwarming that specialist and popular programming such as Top Gear still receives a widescreen repeat on TV, whether or not it's received an iPlayer trail for the week. It's good to see the licence fee go to letting us see the majority of repeats available for watching anytime. If the programmes fall into the "radio-with-pictures" bracket and the camera work is not a selling point of the show (who'd bother with series one of Coast or Planet Earth in a comparatively small window?), that's where the iPlayer really comes into its own.
Monday, 21 January 2008
Catching Up
The DVD Recorder, Panasonic's EZ-27EB, arrived last November but, aside from the purchase of 40 rewritable discs which serve as videotape replacements, the mass transfers I envisaged have not happened.
However, it was heartwarming to realise that my QED Quenex range of cables for enhancing my Analogue signal have not gone to waste. Any other Freeview device could be looped into the second AV port using the RVR extension lead, a fact never publicised by What Hi Fi, and you could do "twin tuner" using separate boxes. My year-old Freeview box purchased in an emergency won't go to waste.
The AV forums veterans swear by the model up from mine, the EX77 or EX87, due to the 160 and 250Gb hard disks they contain. My view is, aside from a Widescreen flag issue which had not been corrected by firmware updates when I bought, is that coming from the PC side of things I would like to know the brands of hard disk supplied inside combination players. Although Maplin sells a Freeview tuning box into which you can install your own drive, this currently remains an EIDE unit at a time when SATA drives are taking over.
If, for example, you own a PS3, it's likely to be a Toshiba hard disk as shown by one modder's dismantling of a console. If you had such knowledge anyway, you would expect Toshiba every time rather than the company having the ability to sell you the cheap and cheerful brand instead, for the same fat price.
As such, it's only if you are planning to buy a DVD and Hard disk combination recorder from Toshiba or Samsung, that you can be more sure about firm selling the player also having manufactured the hard disk inside. Strangely, I am not as worried about whichever disk may feature inside an Xbox 360, since there are a myriad of reasons why this machine could go wrong (and it has technically failed on a high enough scale to cause mass warranty extension). The same mindset applies to the Ipod - it's a portable, you might drop it and cause it to fail, but that's what extended warranties are for.
It's a marketing angle that hasn't been exploited; I know that Western Digital hard drives have personally proven more reliable in the last decade of using them compared to other brands. Whoever marketed this fact, or if WD itself wished to market a PVR in the UK as it has in other territories, would be the next company to get my money.
However, it was heartwarming to realise that my QED Quenex range of cables for enhancing my Analogue signal have not gone to waste. Any other Freeview device could be looped into the second AV port using the RVR extension lead, a fact never publicised by What Hi Fi, and you could do "twin tuner" using separate boxes. My year-old Freeview box purchased in an emergency won't go to waste.
The AV forums veterans swear by the model up from mine, the EX77 or EX87, due to the 160 and 250Gb hard disks they contain. My view is, aside from a Widescreen flag issue which had not been corrected by firmware updates when I bought, is that coming from the PC side of things I would like to know the brands of hard disk supplied inside combination players. Although Maplin sells a Freeview tuning box into which you can install your own drive, this currently remains an EIDE unit at a time when SATA drives are taking over.
If, for example, you own a PS3, it's likely to be a Toshiba hard disk as shown by one modder's dismantling of a console. If you had such knowledge anyway, you would expect Toshiba every time rather than the company having the ability to sell you the cheap and cheerful brand instead, for the same fat price.
As such, it's only if you are planning to buy a DVD and Hard disk combination recorder from Toshiba or Samsung, that you can be more sure about firm selling the player also having manufactured the hard disk inside. Strangely, I am not as worried about whichever disk may feature inside an Xbox 360, since there are a myriad of reasons why this machine could go wrong (and it has technically failed on a high enough scale to cause mass warranty extension). The same mindset applies to the Ipod - it's a portable, you might drop it and cause it to fail, but that's what extended warranties are for.
It's a marketing angle that hasn't been exploited; I know that Western Digital hard drives have personally proven more reliable in the last decade of using them compared to other brands. Whoever marketed this fact, or if WD itself wished to market a PVR in the UK as it has in other territories, would be the next company to get my money.
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