BBC iPlayer HD problem

[dennis]

She doesn't know I have to go looking for it about five minutes before kickoff.

[dennis]

I'm not the clueless one that can't get HD on iPlayer though. I would tell you but I am not using a PC to access it. My TV does iPlayer in UHD and its easy to find.

Maybe I'm not as dim as you are.

[dennis]

Someone else that doesn't know how to get HD on iPlayer then. I wonder if MB will accuse him of being dim?

[Martin Brown]

More likely that your TV is way smarter than you are.

[Martin Brown]

It would appear that provided you are in London and the Home Counties it will very probably all work by default but for everywhere else in the UK if you have set a locality then you get a regional degraded HD service at 960x450. (which is equally wrong for both 720p and 1080p displays)

You have to find a line thin black line right at the bottom of the page just above "Elsewhere on the BBC" to tweak settings and change your locality to "England" - it isn't on the user settings page at all.

Setting location to "England" will force it to provide a true 3-5Mbps HD feed at full native resolution. Shame that their FAQs are complete dross. Failing to provide any useful info about the config settings.

It only seems to be a problem outside of London...surprise surprise.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Makes absolutely no difference

Nope, its a problem IN london as well.

As a 34 year old black nurse working in Hampstead,(well thats what I told the BBC) the feed is exactly the same as what it was when I told them I lived in Milton Keynes and set teh location to EAST

[Martin Brown]

Works for me (even though my link speed is only 6Mbps tops). It identifies itself as 2908kbps | HDS (limelight_hds_https bbc_one_hd)

Quality is way better than the poxy regional feed at 1700kbps.

The FAQs are not correctly indexed and meaningless.

[The Natural Philosopher]

I get 2908kbps 950 x 450 IIRC but not HD. regional or not.

[Martin Brown]

I can't get the codec to tell me the true pixel resolution of the HD stream that I get for "England" but it claims to be BBC_HD and so long as I go there in full screen mode default I get either a 5M stream or a

3M stream depending on which way the wind is blowing. Starting from the partial view on the screen seems less reliable often ending at 1.7M.

But I noticed that if an email comes in whilst it is on at 3M then the stream backs off to 1.7M and never comes back to full quality again :(

[The Natural Philosopher]

Thtat is more consistent with my suspicion that yer beeb is actually interperting response delay into probable line speed and adjusting the rate to get a stutter free delivery, even if its lower res.

[Andy Burns]

Right click the video, you get a pop-up showing the bitrate, resolution, region and which content delivery network are being used.

the DA of DASH video stands for Dynamic Adaptive, it starts off with lower bitrates, and increases if it can see your connection can do more, seamlessly switching to a higher bitrate/resolution stream, but if it senses your connection is struggling it will drop you back down.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Turnip trying to show just how PC he is by boasting he actually talked to a black nurse. An extremely important bit of information to the topic. As was her age. Was that on her badge too?

[dennis]

I took it as him being a compulsive liar and telling the bbc he was a black nurse.