The New Toy

I am having great fun with the Cinema Tube, although most of my viewing has been material which is on some form of drive: in particular iPlayer downloads. Get-iPlayer is a whole lot better than the actual BBC iPlayer for the fact that the downloads don't have the annoying DRM. IPlayer's DRM makes no sense, but neither does DRM in general. The particulars of iPlayer DRM being that the downloads must be played within a week if you begin to view the programme. Otherwise, the thing can sit for months so it seems. I have Rick Stein's Christmas Odyssey waiting to be played on the official iPlayer from late December 09!

Although, up and coming goodies are David Tennant's Hamlet is being repeated. I'll download that in hi-def(another complaint about the official iPlayer). There is also a programme, The Virtual Revolution, which is coming up as well that sounds interesting.

Back to iPlayer DRM, the official player blocks the end users ability to do things with DRM, yet get-iPlayer can download the programmes without the DRM. Even better, it can do so in hi-def! The hi-def versions usually play much better than their other versions. In some manner, get-iPlayer does a sound taxi trick to remove the DRM. Nice!

Although, I did record an episode of Michael Portillo's Great British Railway Journeys (Todmorden to York) which was unplayable. Somehow, when the show came to the City walls bit there was this message that the sound had a difference in speed. Not sure what that means. The Beeb's archives mean that this show is only available in a signed version (as opposed to the hi-def versions availble a little while back).

Not sure if the original version can be fixed, but I am going to give it a try.

In future, I will download the flash versions with get-iplayer since they usually come out better.

Well, so much for reviewing the media server software. I'll save that for a future post.