BBC iPlayer on N800 (almost working).

I saw this ground breaking annoucement (BBC iPlayer for iPhone and iPod Touch is iGo | The Register) and couldn’t resist trying it out on the N800. Since upgrading to OS2008 the general browser video experience with sites like YouTube has been excelent from the tablet so I had some moderate expectations for this experiment.

The experience was only slightly gratifying as I managed to start the embeded flash player and stream the opening credits of  Ashes to Ashes.  Once the program started I began to be irritated by some significant frame skip and rather annoying pauses as it refreshes what must be a pitiful in-memory cache. The rather annoying pauses were also experienced when I tried to watch the same program from my laptop so I can only assume it is some part of the flash applets programming to prevent people from stealing and re-distributing the content by copying the cache file. It would probably be better if I had slightly faster broadband (only on 512KB/s at the mo). The rather more constant issue of frame skip is probably due to the fact that the video is encoded at a significantly higher resolution than your average YouTube clip and the tweaks and hacks in OS2008 are not quite up to the job. The little button to pop up a full screen window also failed to work but thats a minor issue in comparison as the embeded player was already a reasonable proportion of the screen estate.

If anyone tries this on an N810 or even an N800 and has a better experience I would be pleased to hear.