Video download problems (Windows Web PVR)

[Simon Ritchie]

 > recently I have been experiencing issues when downloading videos

I get similar problems with audio. I've seen various postings about 
similar problems and it seems to be caused by networking problems - the 
software which is downloading the file assumes a nice steady connection 
and doesn't cope well when things get a bit bursty. With a typical 
shared broadband connection, this tends to happen during busy periods, 
for example at the weekend or in the evening when the kids come home 
from school. (I worked in an ISP once and there was always a marked 
decrease in network traffic when Dr Who was on the TV. Sad but true.)

Anyhow, that's why trying over and over works - eventually you hit a 
window when everybody else stays quiet for a few minutes and you get 
your download done. I mainly download audio and it tends to happen to me 
with programmes that are at least an hour long - the bigger the file, 
the more chance of hitting a network glitch while downloading it.

If you run your PVR in the middle of the night or very early in the 
morning it will probably work better. As you will have noticed, when the 
PVR it completes, it schedules itself to run in four hours time. Try 
running it before you go to bed, tidy up any failure and leave the PC 
switched on. The odds of the next run working are good.

GetiPlayer is cobbled together from lots of bits of software. The real 
solution is to find the component that's causing the glitch and 
reworking it so that it's not so nervous about temporary network 
glitches, but that will require a fair amount of work by somebody with 
the right skills - probably a couple of days solid work from scratch. 
Like many people who read this forum, I have the skills, but sadly not 
the time.

There is an alternative, which is the YouView system: 
http://www.youview.com. It does something very like getIplayer, but it's 
a supported commercial product and hopefully a bit more resiliant.

Simon