The greatest application in the world wouldn’t be able to mitigate a poor selection of content, and the BBC does at least have this in its favour. A final note of disappointment goes to the BBC’s vast radio output, none of which can currently be downloaded, even though much of it is available as podcasts. So, if you watched The Apprentice this week, there’s no way of telling the iPlayer that you’d also like to download next week’s as well. And neither is there any way to automatically record an entire series. There’s no way to set a maximum download speed, so if you’ve got a few networked PCs and one of them starts downloading a program, your entire network will be at the mercy of the iPlayer application. So if your ISP allows you unlimited off-peak downloading you’ll have to go to the added effort of finding a third-party download or task scheduler to take advantage of it. It’s also disappointing that there’s no scheduling facility built in. For instance, it might nudge you about your data use, but there’s no way of checking how much you’ve used in the application itself. Unfortunately, the iPlayer isn’t weighed down with extra features.

Luckily, the BBC has wised up to download caps, and we were greeted with a warning within the first few hours of use, reminding us to check with our ISP about our download limit. The BBC’s HD video streams at 3.2mbps, or roughly 1.5GB per hour of video, and the 1,500kbps mode adds up fast too. It looks fantastic, although the amount of HD programming on iPlayer at this point is limited, and there’s no way to download high-definition WMVs.Īll this video comes at a hefty data price, of course. Those with large screens will be pleased by the appearance of the BBC’s HD channel, which allows you to stream H.264 1,280 x 720 video through a web browser or download it into the desktop application. The occasional compression artefact means that iPlayer content will never blow you away on a 40in LCD TV, but it’s fine for watching on a laptop. The BBC claims the new mode is “close to TV quality”, and we can’t fault that. But the iPlayer also sports an 832 x 468 full-screen mode for both streaming and downloading which uses 1,500kbps. At its most basic, the iPlayer will stream at 500kbps, and will automatically set itself to this if it detects restricted bandwidth.

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