Quality Variation

[Vangelis forthnet]

On Mon Oct 3 11:42:36 BST 2011, bat guano wrote:

>It's like you said, Monday and Wednesday's shows are currently 56Kbps, the 
>other three are 192Kbps.
>Maybe the BBC will do something about it if they receive complaints.

Hi, bat guano :-)
 Excuse me for saying that, but how do you propose people complain about 
this glitch?

"Hello BBC iPlayer people, I just downloaded with get_iplayer (/other 
preferred rtmp downloader)
these two specific Radio 3 programmes, they were improperly encoded at a far 
lower bitrate than
the current standard of AAC LC at 192kbps for BBC Radio 3 shows.
 Please rectify this by correctly re-encoding and re-uploading the files 
before the 7 day
availability time-window expires. Thanks in advance..."

Please, don't misinterpret my tone; I'm not being sarcastic at you :-). I 
just feel it's not feasible to report
such a c*ck up to the iPlayer team!
As far as a regular iPlayer user is concerned, who streams the audio content 
from the iplayer interface,
he has no clue whatsoever that the encoding team messed up.
The Monday 27/09/2011 show has now expired, but if one in the UK streams in 
one's browser e.g.
Wednesday's
 http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0151r55/Composer_of_the_Week_Antonio_Vivaldi_(16781741)_Years_of_Travel/and Thursday'shttp://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0151rx6/Composer_of_the_Week_Antonio_Vivaldi_(16781741)_Impresario/ episodes in the standard interface, then right-clicks the embedded player,the context-menu erroneously informs him of 128kbps bitrates in both cases(whereas in reality it is 56 kbps for Wed & 192 kbps for Thu).Things are even worse when streaming via the ukradioplayer console interface(for Wed, it's http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/b0151r55),where the rc context-menu provides no indication at all for used bitrates! To discover the glitch, you have to first download the streams (which is abig NO-NO for the BBC) and inspect them with tools such as MediaInfo,FFmpeg, mp4box -info etc. I hope you now see my point!Cheers, Vangelis.