Refusenik Heresy?

Nomad has to admit that deprivation of F1 has finally driven him to accept output from the BBC. You will no doubt be relieved to hear that he has not bought a TV Licence and niether has he installed iPlayer. Nomad wishes not to install iPlayer for fear that the BBC will use it against him in some way.

The 'pro' version of TVersity includes the capability to subscribe to RSS video feeds; but it also allows you to subscribe to a number of proprietary feeds which includes the BBC. Presumably TVersity emulates an iPlayer client for this to work. If you live in the US it also allows you to subscribe to Hulu. We are still waiting for Hulu to arrive in the UK obviously.

The media player refused to play some files, but turning on transcoding seems to have made the problem go away. Why that should be is unclear. The media player seems unable to work out how long each file is and will not jump to a given time in the file. Starting and re-starting files in the middle also appears to cause chaos.

Otherwise it is working well. So far I have watched "Have I got news for you", the Sao Paulo Grand Prix and half the Welsh rally. Hopefully "Toy Stories" will appear in the listing tomorrow. I also watched a documentary about aviation in the thirties which reminded me why I dislike the BBC and television in general; the fascination of the material was more than a little obscured by the prejudices of the producers. Nomad has been a kinder, gentler person for the past few months and one factor is an abscence of the apoplexy that would be induced by watching any news or current affairs material from the BBC. Obviously I will add Top Gear to the list of programmes above but the line has to be drawn somewhere and on the whole I just dont miss the BBC very much.

Update: Tversity only allows use of the iPlayer content as a streaming service. This explains the occasionally jerky picture. Mostly however the quality is good. The pause button on my media player does not work and will cause a jump to the next programme item. Niether can you jump to a time in the programme. This means that if you are halfway through the Abu Dhabi GP you really dont want to press pause! The choice of programmes available also appears to be restricted more than on the BBC version.