I watch iPlayer on my little netbook , but to be honest the poor thing can just about cope with the small window size iplayer as it is. Full screen is a journey into stop motion animation. If they up the bandwidth the whole thing might become unwatchable on it. I hope they remember we don't all use quad core xeons with a fat pipe connection!

Watched some Louis Theroux last night, and when I hit fullscreen, my laptop [Centrino with 845 graphics] ground to a halt.

Handily however, I ordered the better part of a grands worth of hardware yesterday, which arrived this morning. So I'll plumb that together tonight, and iPlayer problems will be no more. I imagine a 2.4Ghz Core2Quad, 4gb of RAM and a Radeon 3850 should just about cover the requirements for HD-over-flash...

...just about.

What a happy coincidence.

Steven R

But will the Wii be able to take advantage? It makes for an excellent iPlayer box for the TV, except that the quality is a little poor.

Hmmm the ISPs are going to love that one! All that data streaming over their already stretched networks, should be intresting when the BBC gets another group of ISPs up in arms about it's customer's demands for more bandwidth.

It means I don't have to use AIR (which didn't work on any of my computers joined to my home domain), and it also has another benefit on my XP VM.

Well it was a load faster than this new service!

The service itself is stunning, I was amazed at the quality and am impressed at the new resize button - the way they've implemented it is far better than the way it was in Labs.

It'll be intersting to see how this will play out with the ISPs. Playing with the service last night I noticed that Robin Hood had a download size of 900Mb. Therefore once you watch three HD shows in a month you'll be well over the cap level of the smaller broadband services. Even on Virgin you'd likely hit the limit with two shows in an afternoon.

Waits for Daily Mail: "BBC WANTS PEOPLE TO PAY TWICE TO WATCH SHOWS??!!!!" in a week.

The reason the BBC want us to use iPlayer and other multi media devices to view them, is so they can bring in a PC & Phone tax!.

They don't care if they are killing the UK's internet bandwidth, or that they used loads of "TV tax" payers money making the thing.

...THEM "Have you a PC?" ... YOU "Yes" ... THEM "then you need to pay a tax to us"

... YOU "But my PC cant pick up the TV :/ " ... THEM "Well it can now m8, so hand the cash over or we will send you very aggressive letters, and then come in to your home and interview you under caution!.

BBC-TV crap is still crap, even in HD.

...they just need to drop RealPlayer from their audio service so people like me who are abroad a good deal don't have to put up with 64k streams, and it'll be a great service!

I now rarely sit in front of the TV or record stuff, as the BBC iPlayer is the dogs bollocks. I did look at ITV once, but the stupid stiffs are using Silverlight. What's that all about then?

Silverlight, like Quicktime & iTunes is coming nowhere near my bloody PC.

Watching iPlayer streaming in the new high res at 3AM (I work shifts) is marvellous, long may it continue.

So far so pants, 12kbs - 13.03 hours left for a half hour viewing - need I say more ?????

hmmm, looks like quite a few companies are moving from P2P model to adaptive direct streaming...possibly because they've seen how poor the general infrastructure is at the end - want your service to look ropey because of the generally poor upload speeds of most providers (hint, when your uplink gets swamped ALL your networking gets sluggish)

I suppose I have to cough up for a new computer since this doesn't work at all on my current one at home.

At least we won't have to cough up for a TV licence for work now though just in case someone accidentally clicks on a "watch live" link on the BBC websites.

..how the flash video player's framerates are a tad lower windowed (even on beasting machines). However, it's silky smooth fullscreen. Looks lovely on the LED backlit panel on my laptop (though the damn thing gets a bit hot after streaming HD for a couple of hours).

Still though, nice one beeb, looking good!

Another nail in the coffin of the fantasy that El Reg is read by people who know something about tech.

Anyone with any sense would have nothing to do with Virgin, which is only interested in competing with the dregs for the rank of worst UK ISP. There are a raft of decent Internet companies around, and I'm loving the new streams. I wouldn't call 832x468 @1.5Mbps 'HD' though - that's a bit of false advertising.

Haven't watched the BBC "on air" for ages now - just adore the iPlayer.

For those who critique them, if you've used 4OD, ITV et al you'll know what abject garbage they are compared to the iPlayer.

My only gripe - can we have shows for longer than 7 days please, remembering to download the latest episode of x, y or z is a real pain, I missed the last episode of "Grow your own drugs" because the iDesktop isn't clever enough to pick it up for me.

Also, when are they going to start flogging this service to non-UK households - the Beeb could generate so much revenue by exposing itself to a pay-to-view international audience.

They are still blocking mobile access (from TMobile at least). I know some muppets wont understand data caps but why is that BBC's concern? If I want to watch a news article on my mobile then thats my business :(

I've been trialling the Linux beta on labs. My netbook can't cope with the 1500Kbps, and it's a standard Atom machine, like most of the others on the market. Surely the Beeb realise that the offline mode is often used to watch when there's no Internet connection, like on the train? I bought my netbook because it's convenient for the train - no other reason.

Also, there were install issues on Linux the last time I looked, because the app doesn't ask for rights elevation when installing or updating.

Why don't they just offer two or three different quality levels for offline download??

Ubuntu 9.04, installed it last night and it worked perfectly. Haven't messed with the HD stuff yet mind, just did a quick download and play to make sure it worked.

sadly, the beeb's offline videos are the only ones that won't stream to the media player hooked up to my telly downstairs :( all other DRM'd media plays perfectly.

I've never seen the point in watching TV on my desktop PC upstairs when I could be crashed on the sofa in front of the idiot box :)

Check out "get_iplayer" as a download mechanism. Allows downloading of content to a local file for viewing later, as well as running via cron to get your weekly / daily etc download requirements.

Check out Nvidia's VDPAU new output mechanism under Linux for decent HD output with minimal CPU usage. Only works with certain Nvidia cards, primarily 8000 and 9000 series cards though. Already incorporated into released versions of mplayer etc, and is in the current dev version of MythTV (as well as some unofficial backports to the curernt release version 0.21). The Linux community are raving about this!

@Steven Raith, I managed to download and watch 'Dr Who' after downloading this HD stream with get_iplayer (oddly enough on the 16th April even before the HD service was launched by the BBC!) adn it played just fine on my 3GHz celeron with G400 Matrox card and full res. So there *is* hope for old hardware as long as you don't try to view these monsters through the web browser (or AIR).

mike: you shouldn't need VDPAU to play back even the HD versions, unless you're using a really weedy PC. (Now, Atom-based netbooks will probably struggle with it - but they don't have VDPAU-capable graphics anyway.) Where it's really needed is playing back over-the-air HD, particularly BBC HD.