BBC iPlayer on Freesat
I have been a little bit out of touch with the world of Freesat just recently, but thanks to the launch of the Food Network (channel 405) I have become complete addicted to it over the first couple of days of my Christmas break. The PVR is actually getting some use for once!
But I was reminded of the fact that the BBC iPlayer beta was made available to owners of the Humax boxes (both the Foxsat HD and HDR) this week by my former Red Rant colleague Tom Eccles. I gave it a try last night watching Games Britannia I had missed the night before with pretty reasonable results.
So how do you get to the iPlayer beta? Just like this. Go to any BBC channel, press the red button and enter page 5483. Confirm with the OK button and you are greeted with the front page.
From here I headed over to the Channels tab, to be greeted by the usual suspects.
Results were pretty favourable when I watched Games Britannia. My broadband is around 6Mb, so I watched in Higher Quality (as shown in the second to last picture requires a “high speed internet connection” but doesn’t actually specify how fast it needs to be) and had no problems with the programme stuttering or ever stopping to cache more of the stream.
The only significant issue I did have was trying to skip forward in the programme. I tried to skip forward by 60 seconds, and the HDR box reset itself. This wasn’t confined to my tests last night, when I took these photos to test today it did the exact same thing again.
On a purely cosmetic side I did notice a lot of “pop in” where the screen textures would go blocky for a second before creating a final smoother image. Particularly in scenes that involved a lot of movement. This is to be expected with what is essentially glorified web video.
While I don’t really watch a great deal of BBC content (save for almost anything on BBC HD) having the iPlayer as an option directly on the Freesat box means I would be more than happy to watch it this way than have to watch it on a PC.
There are certainly glitches that need to be ironed out before iPlayer is unleashed to all Freesat users, but so far things are looking pretty good.
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Category: Freesat
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About the Author (Author Profile)
By day I work in IT as an infrastructure manager, specialising in Microsoft technologies, primarily Windows and Exchange Server.
On here I write about my passions, movies, videogames, technology and particularly the world of high definition.
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Do you have to have the box conected to the web to have this service like with the Wii ?
Yup. Ethernet cable connected up to the Freesat box and away you go.