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

[Tell]

My anger is that Evesham were duping people with their advertising and my only reason to buy that product was to get recordable DTT HD, as the adverts promised with people reporting that it worked via Evesham quotes within the adverts. They turned if off yet continued to run the same promotion.

Now months on the same HD transmissions still run and yes a sad indicement to the company if that was the last software upgrade one. Typical British spririt prevales in this one.

[Bob Crabtree]

Tell,

Thanks for the carefully-worded apology - much appreciated.

Bob (walks off muttering and wondering WFT people think it's okay to slag others off without reason and never admit their errors)

[buggins]

I too am with Bob on this one. Whilst the Iplayer had many problems, the turning off of the HD test transmission facility didn't bother me. Why? Because there were, and are, just that. A test or trial by the BBC to a closed group that they wanted to nominate. If somebody else wanted to listen and watch over the BBC's shoulder then it was at their risk. My Iplayer went back to Evesham for a refund but I seem to remember they had a get out with phrases like HD ready, and not referring to the actual test transmissions directly as to location or availability.
As a tongue firmly in cheek, thought for Tell. Would you have been angry with Evesham if the BBC turned off their London based tests and transferred if to tramsmitters in the North of Scotland? Both tests could be deemed to be of use for the engineers but the population of "looker ins" would be different.

[MarkR]

As we "speak", no doubt Netgem and Evesham are busy working on the new firmware to re-enable HD for when HD is open to the public.

You can't get around the fact Evesham / Netgem have sold the iplayer without properly supporting it and they did mislead purchasers as to its functionality. The futureproofing was the first thing they turned off and remains the only update.

[robpete]

Hi

I just asked Evesham to take back my Iplayer becasue of continous problems with the hdmi audio and other things which they couldn't fix ( I had two), I had the box from the first day they sold it and the problems started a month later.

Just a word to Bob Crabtree, thanks for all your help and honest answers over the past year, lot of effort - pity that didn't get through to Netgem and evesham and that other recent idiot poster.

Anyone care to tell me if a good hd upscaling freeview PVR is out there, I don't archive so big storage is not an issue. Or how about a cheap but decent DVD HD player?

Thanks
Peter

[MarkR]

Sorry to hear that robpete. There is nothing like the iplayer out there, as far as I can see. I dont use hdmi audio so I cant comment.

I was very surprised today when my new Twonky media server played BBC HD material perfectly over a wireless lan (g). I thought that was a no go area. As a result I am seeing what else it can do. So far, much better than I thought.

Toshiba do a few good HDDVD players at different prices. There is a Pace box for £99 that does BBCHD if you have a dish.

[Bob Crabtree]

Here are some things that I recently found very interesting concerning playback and repurposing of the HD footage that the Beeb was putting out over Freeview during its trial.

First, while I had hands on with an iPlayer, my Athlon 64 3200 PC simply wasn't up to the task of playing the HD footage but my latest PC - Intel Core Duo E6600 with NVIDIA GeForce 7900GS graphics - is perfectly comfortable with it, though some programs, notably VLC and Nero ShowTime Essentials handle it better than others.

More interesting still (well, to me), I have found some paid-for programs that can repurpose this HD footage with a lot less hassle and far more quickly than the one free program I'd recently stumbled upon, mplayer.

Most prominent of these apps is DivX Author V1.5. However, after a few hours messing, I'm far more attacted to a couple of programs from TMPGEnc.

One is TMPEnc's own variant of that DivX app - "DVD Author 3 with DivX Authoring" (seemingly the two companies collaborated on the creation of both apps, but TMPGEnc's version has a richer output range, not being restricted only to DivX).

The other TMPGEnc app - TMPGEnc 4.0 Express - seems to me to be the mutt's nuts as far as repurposing HD goes and is VERY quick, even for two-pass encodes.

Significantly, well, to me at any rate, there seems to be no problem bringing together multiple files that iPlayer broke up when saving out to a USB-attached, FAT32-formatted HDD, and I found that impressive.

Mind you, I've probably not had enough time with these three apps (or with mplayer) to be very judgemental so folk should put too much store right now in what I'm saying.

Bob C
(just off to restart his PC after installing the latest updater for TMPGEnc DVD Author 3 with DivX Authoring - and then burning my first DVD produced from the Beeb's HD footage)

[MarkR]

Interesting Bob. How long to convert say 1 hour BBC HD to DivX? I found it too long on my 3Ghz pc - then one file kept failing to convert so I packed that up as an idea.

I bought a £45 dish on ebay and a £99 Pace HD dish to watch day to day. To record I have a Hauppauge card - its fairly unwatchable really on my PC - and a 750gb hard drive in a QNAP TS109 Pro. I convert the .ts to mpg using Xmuxer and archive that. It can then be served up to the iplayer on a usb drive or using the QNAP Twonky server - no stutter. Eventually I hope to transfer all the recordings to HDDVD or something. Actually Bob, I forgot about your VERY fast PC. Maybe I could just drop my USB drive by sometime.

The QNAP can download torrents (not that I do) which are immediately available on the iplayer over Twonky too.

As a media player the iplayer is pretty impressive - just very temperamental.

[Bob Crabtree]

Mark,

I've just set TMPGEnc 4.0 Express running to encode an HD episode of Planet Earth to DivX HD in a single pass (there's probably eight or nine minutes of overmatter on that HD recording, too, so I think it is about an hour or just under.

With 12mins elapsed, it's telling me there's 1hr and 46mins to go - and this is on a PC which, right now, has the follow apps also running:

Outlook
Excel
Firefox (two windows and three tabs)
Two anti-nasties apps sitting in the background (AVG Free and SpyBot's Teatimer), along with my anti-spam filter (SpamSleuth) and Skype and Google Desktop and a system monitoring app.

Task Manager tells me I'm using 1.37GB of RAM (out of 2GB) and that the twin CPUs are running at 96%-98%.

Now, after 22mins elapsed, it's telling me there's 1hr 39mins to go.

Out of curiosity, how did you manage to accurately align you dish(es?) and what HD stuff are you getting - just BBC HD or is there other stuff out there on satellite?

As for dropping off your USB drive - no need, really, I've got no shortage of external storage here, but very nice of you to think of me!

;-)

Cheers

Bob

[MarkR]

Bob,

That does seem very quick. Xmuxer takes that long just remuxing it (much slower PC of course). I trust the quality is pukka. Trouble is, once you start on that "fast PC" road......

Just BBCHD - otherwise you need to move the dish. Anyway Silent Witness, India and Heroes are all very watchable IMO and England on Saturday, hopefully. Planet Earth S1&2 and Galapagos are obviously 10/10.

For the dish, a map for bearing and a satellite finder off ebay. Took about half an hour and some patience. Nothing for ages and then it beeps. I regret not buying a dual or quad LNB - I can only have it connected to either my PC or Pace box at any one time.

A used Evesham iplayer went for £154 on ebay yesterday. I was watching it and would have picked it up myself at <£100. I could have sworn one of the bidders was BobC.

Network Storage with Twonkyvision works really well with the iplayer. No more taking the USB drive up and down stairs (unless I am uploading - my PC just will not run a media server). I chuck everything onto the server and it is available 24/7. Playback, even HD, is faultless and doesnt need a PC. Not sure why I like it so much - I think its that cutting edge feeling and the flashing network lights!

Good thinking Bob, I'll send you the stuff on DVDs.

[Bob Crabtree]

Mark,

The quality is good but I'm seeing significant lip-synch problems with all three apps.

In contrast, non-copyrighted DVDs don't seem to suffer any such problem.

Thanks for the info about what HD stuff you're able to watch and the setting up - including the tips.

As for me bidding for an Evesham iplayer - not likely unless I thought I could get it for a VERY small price (and that would be some way less than &#163;50).

Oh and can I take it that you're saying that you are able to get sensible network connection speeds up and down when using the iplayer?

If so, that's good news, cos it's something I totally failed to achieve during my time with an iplayer - and never had a clue why, other than some problem with the iplayer hardware.

Oh - and I would be keen to have a fiddle with some of your HD footage - especially to see if there are lip-synch issues when it's repupurposed.

[MarkR]

Lip sync for some reason was a problem area when I was trying to change the BBCHD ts. In the end Procoder Express handled it well for me and Xmuxer doesnt mess up sync either. PM me to let me know how I could help - what to send you. You may need to change ts to an mpg before repurposing. The problem I think you face is to find an easy way to do it without spending money.

Having read the previous posts I thought BBCHD was a no no. I have always had to remux the BBCHD .ts into an mpg or avi (with USB HD) but it then plays perfectly at 16Mb/s over USB or network. I did switch my network to g only but I will try it with mixed g and b. I was amazed. In fact it plays pretty much everything I throw at it. Using the Hard drive or Network it does sometimes come up with "cannot play video" messages, particularly with HD. Rebooting the machine solves the problem and it stays solved for at least that evening. I was told that it was because its internal cache was full. Apart from .ts files I cant off the top of my head think of anything it doesnt play.
(For the record it a BT homehub, Buffalo wireless bridge and TS-109 Pro)

HELP: I was trying to upload today to my NAS (TS-109). I entered details and tested configuration - it said everthing was fine and saved settings. I then tried to export. The iplayer says "Export failed - shared folder cannot be accessed". If I then look in the folder (using my PC) I can see the files but it has only 4KB, 8KB and one had 140KB and played for a millisecond. So it seems to start but fails for some reason. Any ideas greatly appreciated. Its not the end of the world but if that worked it would make life very easy.

[damianw]

I'm with Bob, could never get the networking to perform adequately. It won't play DVD quality movies for me (mpeg2 files, about 1Gb per hour I guess), even though I've switched thenetworking to use Devolo LAN over powerline adapters which are reporting 150Mbps throughput available.

Still, short of a media PC I still can't see anything out there which does what the iplayer does. Which is a shame, because if Topfield or Humax did something similar I'd buy it in a shot and send the iplayer back to Evesham on fire.

[schmunk]

Still, short of a media PC I still can't see anything out there which does what the iplayer does. Which is a shame, because if Topfield or Humax did something similar I'd buy it in a shot and send the iplayer back to Evesham on fire.

http://www.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=9766 may be of interest to you?

[MarkR]

Hi DamianW

The twonky server on the ts-109 delivers the BBCHD 16mbs stream (mpg) over a wirelss lan without any problems at all. I would certainly give it another try.

The TS109 is Linux based I think. I read your posts, but did you have any problems exporting files (apart from speed)? I don't understand why the TS109 / iplayer stops after a few KBs. Thanks.

[Bob Crabtree]

Mark,

I happen to have just installed the trial version of Edius a few days back and that includes ProCoder Express for Edius - so I'll try using that. I took a look at Xmuxer's home page but got frightened off by the seeming complexity.

Money's not necessarily the issue - though, of course, it's a factor.

As for your decent network performance, am I to take it that this isn't iPlayer's network performance you are talking about but, instead, the performance of the network itself when playing (and not via iPlayer) programmes that you have recorded on iPlayer and converted?

Or have I got that completely wrong and, in fact, the network performance with iplayer is okay both ways if you are using a Linux-based NAS box for the media?

As for your plea for help - sorry, I've not got a clue what might be going on.