Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[sevenlayermuddle]

In the past year or so I have gone from having no ways of getting iPlayer onto my TV screen, to three... Streaming from iPad and Apple TV, or Samsung smart Blu Ray  player, and now Panasonic smart TV.  All of this became feasible with arrival of FTTC, lifting my 3 Mbps-ish by about ten-fold.

On each of these, when it works, it's fine.   The HD version of iPlayer is no match for direct recordings from Freeview HD, but it is still pretty darned good.   The trouble is, I rarely get to watch a program in entirety without at least one picture freeze, lasting a second or two up to a few tens of seconds.

I have also used, quite extensively, Apple movie rental and Netflix, both in HD, and neither ever freezes, not ever,  they just work.  Perfectly.  4k /UHD streaming, in as far as I've been able to play with it from YouTube, is faultless.

So - since all of these technologies are black magic voodoo to me, can anybody explain, is there any valid reason why BBC can't provide a quality of service to match Apple and Netflix et al?

I don't think my home network is at fault, TV and optical player are both wired LAN, and equally bad for BBC.

[kitz]

I'm a big streamer of i-player which accounts for most of my TV viewing.   I have a few different ways of accessing it :-

• iPad/iPod  -> ATV
• Toshiba Smart TV
• LG smart sound system which has iplayer installed & can also mirror via an app from android only devices, but I haven't tried the latter for mirrored streaming.

I can confirm that I have no problems ie stuttering or buffering on either on the ATV or Toshiba smartTV which is where I usually use HD quality.
The only thing I can perhaps think of is what is your wifi capability, but you say you seem to see the same via LAN?   
I also seem recall there was a problem about 18 months ago with my particular router that only affected i-player and certain iOS which caused the app to pause.  Zyxel released a patch and all has been fine since.

[sevenlayermuddle]

I'm a big streamer of i-player which accounts for most of my TV viewing.   I have a few different ways of accessing it :-

• iPad/iPod  -> APTV
• Toshiba Smart TV
• LG smart sound system which has iplayer installed & can also mirror via an app from android only devices, but I haven't tried the latter for mirrored streaming.

I can confirm that I have no problems ie stuttering or buffering on either on the APTV or Toshiba smartTV which is where I usually use HD quality.
The only thing I can perhaps think of is what is your wifi capability, but you say you seem to see the same via LAN?   
I also seem recall there was a problem about 18 months ago with my particular router that only affected i-player and certain iOS which caused the app to pause.  Zyxel released a patch and all has been fine since.

Thanks, but yes - my TV and the DVD are both on wired Lan.  Not that it seems to be needed, the ATV is on WiFi and copes fine with HD movies from Apple and Netflix.

My router's a billion 7800DXL, not much over a year old and quite highly regarded.   But come to think of it, I think I may have noticed and then forgotten, a few weeks ago, that a firmware upgrade was available.   If so, might be worth a try.

Edit: replaced the word 'who' with the word I intended, 'ago'.  Blasted chell speckers.

[kitz]

But come to think of it, I think I may have noticed and then forgotten, a few weeks ago, that a firmware upgrade was available.   If so, might be worth a try.

If so Im not quite sure what to suggest.  It does seem rather strange that it should also be happening on the LAN. 
If it was just for a few split seconds then somewhere else could be CRC's  retx etc... but I wouldnt expect that for longer, nor would it only apply to just iplayer.

Does it ever happen in SD iplayer?   I know you say you dont have any problems with HD Netflix, but if it just happened in HD, then the most obvious pointer would to me be bandwidth.. or perhaps even something to do with bufferbloat.  I dont know enough about bufferbloat, but I dont see why that would affect app x and not app y. 

Admittedly most of the programs I watch on iplayer are at normal definition (because obviously they offer less choice in HD) , but Ive certainly watched more than enough HD progs over the past few years to have noticed something.   I just had another thought - how about if you stream to your PC?  Any problems with that?

[sevenlayermuddle]

I may experiment with SD, or streaming to PC but tbh, it might mean ithat might mean sitting for a half hour or more, watching something I don't want to watch, or have already watched, waiting to see if it freezes.   

There's also the possibility it could be ISP congestion but I'd be surprised if Zen allowed that to happen with something as pivotal as iPlayer, given the reputation they have, and wouldn't want to lose.

I don't know much about how any of these technologies work,  and certainly not about bufferbloat, and I'm trying to avoid getting side-tracked into an obsessive self-teaching exercise.   But TBH you've answered my implied question, that iPlayer doesn't always act up and can work well.  With that in mind, the other possibility is that I just need to be more forgiving, open minded to the possibility I have just been very unlucky so far, and give it a chance to redeem itself. 

[kitz]

There's also the possibility it could be ISP congestion but I'd be surprised if Zen allowed that to happen with something as pivotal as iPlayer, given the reputation they have, and wouldn't want to lose

No I wouldn't have thought either, iplayer (BBC) would come from a different peering route than Netflix etc (akami iirc) but it certainly wouldnt be in Zens interest to make sure they havent got enough bandwidth from the BBC.