Evesham iplayer - the Freeview PVR you've dreamt about!

[MarkR]

Sorry to disagree - It has HDTV printed on it - not HDTV Ready. Downloaded HD content or upscaled SD content is not considered HDTV. "Prepared for HD broadcasts" means, in my books, it works with HD broadcasts. The customer review states it works with the BBC HD service and Evesham have left the review on their site. The manual states "it can record around 30 hours of High Definition programmes" - the only way to have HD content on the hard drive is via HD DVB. It is also implied all over the place - "A cost effective alternative to SkyHD" says it all.

[Tell]

Mark exactly.

So far I have the consumers association and local trading standards. If we all got onto these bodies then Evesham would either stop misleading the public in it's sales pitch, documentation and product box or re-enable it and stop being petty arses.

[MarkR]

Tell, to be honest they have probably sold so few units that the best you will get is return the thing for a full refund. I like mine but I just hate being misled (analogue pq is crap but HDMI is very good). They won't switch it back on. We dont even seem to know if it is just BBC-HD or ALL-HD. Its the early adopter thing.

Forgetting the BBCHD thing for a moment, there is a lack of information. Please Bob, if possible, can you find out what it plays and doesn't play. What it might play in the future too. - It takes along time to encode HD material. Mpeg2, 4 DivX, audio codecs. Just tonight I encoded 2 x m2p files to compare and it wont play either. OK so I can probably tweak them to play but a definitive list would be good. Support, FAQ's and a knowledge base would be better. An Evesham iplayer forum would be a great sign of openness and commitment.

[damianw]

I bought a Synology CS406 NAS appliance last week, and have just finished setting it up. It includes a UPnP media server, and I had no expectation that this server would do anything except perhaps stream mp3 and photos to the iplayer. Well I was wrong, it will stream video too! So I guess some media servers other than WMC are compatible with it.

Thought this might be of use to anyone else trying to do what I was doing, i.e. to have large centralised storage of media and then stream it to the TV using the iplayer.

edit: I should point out I've only streamed a couple of small WMVs from the CS406, so its not an extensive test... since the 406 also supports SMB shares, it will stream from that anyway as per Windows or Linux server.

[Bob Crabtree]

Forgetting the BBCHD thing for a moment, there is a lack of information. Please Bob, if possible, can you find out what it plays and doesn't play. What it might play in the future too. - It takes along time to encode HD material. Mpeg2, 4 DivX, audio codecs. Just tonight I encoded 2 x m2p files to compare and it wont play either. OK so I can probably tweak them to play but a definitive list would be good. Support, FAQ's and a knowledge base would be better. An Evesham iplayer forum would be a great sign of openness and commitment.

Mark,

Evesham has told me what it plays and I have a list of stuff that I've tried myself.

But there is no point my asking Evesham what will be added, cos, judging by past responses to similar questions on future changes, the company will say it cannot comment (though not pointing out, of course, that this is because what happens is totally out of its control and solely up to Netgem).

[Bob Crabtree]

I bought a Synology CS406 NAS appliance last week, and have just finished setting it up. It includes a UPnP media server, and I had no expectation that this server would do anything except perhaps stream mp3 and photos to the iplayer. Well I was wrong, it will stream video too! So I guess some media servers other than WMC are compatible with it.

Thought this might be of use to anyone else trying to do what I was doing, i.e. to have large centralised storage of media and then stream it to the TV using the iplayer.

edit: I should point out I've only streamed a couple of small WMVs from the CS406, so its not an extensive test... since the 406 also supports SMB shares, it will stream from that anyway as per Windows or Linux server.

This is, of course, of interest - so please keep us up to date - but also, please, can you give us a clue about the sorts of transfer speeds you are seeing over Ethernet when you export from iplayer to your NAS box.

I ask because, in my view (judging from what I've seen here), the speed is so slow as to virtually make export over Ethernet too tedious to be usable, except by monks and those whose hobby is to watch paint dry.

[damianw]

This is, of course, of interest - so please keep us up to date - but also, please, can you give us a clue about the sorts of transfer speeds you are seeing over Ethernet when you export from iplayer to your NAS box.

I ask because, in my view (judging from what I've seen here), the speed is so slow as to virtually make export over Ethernet too tedious to be usable, except by monks and those whose hobby is to watch paint dry.

Not sure how I can test transfer speeds in a scientific way as my iplayer is attached to the network via a wireless bridge. I will concur that the performance I've seen when doing exports has been poor, taking several hours to export a single 2Gb recording.

[Tell]

Mark,

Evesham has told me what it plays and I have a list of stuff that I've tried myself.

But there is no point my asking Evesham what will be added, cos, judging by past responses to similar questions on future changes, the company will say it cannot comment (though not pointing out, of course, that this is because what happens is totally out of its control and solely up to Netgem).

Yes but did Netgem decide that it would no longer support HD DTT in this country on this box ?. I wouldn't think so. Basically if Evesham gets up to sharp practice of disabling functions after you have bought the box and also crow on about how well the functions work, that they have disabled, then it says stay away from Netgem and Evesham who can't be trusted not to change the functionality of box and sell you something that isn't as sold since they disable it it after you bought it or the adverts are wrong.

[capt_cornflake]

I don't know about the trial ending recently - and if you or anyone else knows this for sure, then I think a lot of us would be keen to hear.

As for everything else you say - I think you are spot on.

I'm sure I read an article on the BBC a month or two back saying the trial was over, but I can't find it now.

The only thing I could find was a report on the trial published in November (here for those interested.)

The above link is to a PDF - so right-click to download - Bob C

I really don't understand what people are whinging about IT WAS A CLOSED TRIAL.
It's like buying a BlueRay player before any disks are on sale and then complaining that you were mislead.

[Bob Crabtree]

Cap'n,

Thanks for that - I've fired off a couple of emails to the Beeb to try to double-check.

[Bob Crabtree]

Just had confirmation from someone very close to the BBC that the BBC HD trial on Freeview is still running.

Here's what he said:

Yes, still on-air, but not sure for how long, here's the schedule http://www.bbc.co.uk/hd/.
(This lets you see what on HD on a day-by-day basis - Bob C)

Also see http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/openhdtv/.

Oh, and far from incidentally - today is the last day to sign up for the petition he mentions. The petition says,

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to force Ofcom to allocate the unused radio spectrum after the analogue switchover to HDTV services

[Bob Crabtree]

Our review of iplayer is live at last live!

Really, honestly!

Check it out.

[Steve]

Interesting stuff about the ext2 formatted Maxtor going south. Provided the drive is mechanically and electronically sound, it's likely that the MBR/partition table got corrupted somehow - ext2 can't break drives

I don't like the idea of formatting drives to ext2. However, NTFS write support in the Linux kernel is fairly new... still wouldn't let any of my vital drives near it.

[Bob Crabtree]

Interesting stuff about the ext2 formatted Maxtor going south. Provided the drive is mechanically and electronically sound, it's likely that the MBR/partition table got corrupted somehow - ext2 can't break drives

I don't like the idea of formatting drives to ext2. However, NTFS write support in the Linux kernel is fairly new... still wouldn't let any of my vital drives near it.

I've actually got a feeling that I'm not going to be able to retrieve that drive but, as I said in the piece, I haven't yet made a proper attempt with decent disk-recovery tools.

I'll probably have a go this weekend and report back here and add an updater to the review.

[damianw]

Good review Bob. If you don't mind I'd like to present a "second opinion".

I must say I've warmed to the iplayer over time. Bear in mind that I only have an old SD TV, that I didn't have access to the HD trial, and that I am, without any shadow of a doubt, a complete computer geek.

I agree entirely with many of the negatives levelled at the iplayer. 2Gb file limits, slow networking performance, a poor browser. Yes there's no denying those. And there were some that weren't listed - my iplayer still reboots itself shortly after being put into standby mode, pretty much without fail. And many of us have had our hard disks wiped after powering off and on. Not good attributes for a piece of consumer electronics.

But try hard and there are positives. Its small, and I like that. Apart from an occasional hard disk seek, its completely silent. No fans here. No huge media PC consuming gigawatts of electricity.

As a pure PVR, its fast. I wish my NTL settop box could display a 5 day programme guide and do DTV text as quickly.

Exporting over a network is slow. But does it matter? Set the export going, put the iplayer into standby and the export still happens. In my environment, where the iplayer predominantly uses an always-on NAS appliance for both exporting and streaming, it really doesn't matter how long the exports take. Just leave it overnight.

Speaking of streaming, having a PVR that can display my photo collection on the TV is one of the key reasons I bought it. Its a little clunky, as all iplayer things are, but the photos are displayed very crisply and its become a really pleasant way of showing family and friends our collection.

When it comes down to it, its still difficult to recommend the iplayer for most people. But, for me, the main reasons for that are the price and the lack of twin tuners. Fix either of those and suddenly it would be a lot more appealing. Priced at 150 quid, you could forgive it a lot...

[Steve]

I'll probably have a go this weekend and report back here and add an updater to the review.

Zeroing it with the manufacturer's diagnostic tools will probably do the trick.

2Gb file limits...

Just been reading about this in the review. The iPlayer does the best it can. FAT16 only supports <=2GB files. FAT32 does appear to support <=4GB, but that's still a PITA. Regardless, FAT is a terrible filesystem for storing large files... shame the network interface sucks really.