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.

Try not to gloat!

The BBC is in trouble again. The extent to which the BBC is under the cosh can be seen from the fact that this announcement prompts instant criticism for not going far enough.
Link to story: BBC to axe jobs

Remote Control

Nomad has chosen to go down the media player route instead of putting a PC in his living room. Trying to use a PC from your armchair is not easy. This is mainly down to the lack of a useful remote control device. A while ago we mentioned the Weramouse but this thing looks much better.
http://glidetv.com/

An urgent message (so called)

TV Licensing write to Nomad every month now. The gist of thier letters is that Nomad is a criminal and that the net is slowly being drawn tighter.
Is it worth telephoning them to explain that Nomad now longer watches television? The answer appears to be that this will just prompt a visit. Nomad is inclined to think that there is value in wasting the time of the "enforcement officers" as it means that they will have less time to catch the real offenders. For now the plan is to to carry on ignoring the letters. Obviously this blog will carry the news if Nomad gets a visit for real.

No taxation without representation?

It seems that in Britain today the government can tax you and you don't get to know what they spend the money on. In fact you don't even get to know how much money they spent in court making sure that you don't have that right. Happy now?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/6254890/BBC-wins-right-to-keep-costs-secret.html

Well done Mr Justice Irwin; you have most eloquently made the case for Nomads boycott.

'The Corporation'

Nomads view is that this blogs continued use of 'The Corporation' to refer to the BBC has become a rather tedious affectation. Lets simply call the thing by its name in future. For consistency the old tags (but not post text) will be updated.