iplayer change or...

[Jim web]

On 09 Sep, web at audiomisc.co.uk wrote:

> > There are a couple of reports of this starting to trickle in over at
> > the forums today too [1]. Not sure what's going on yet. 

Following on:

I've had a chat with someone at the BBC about the topics I raised. I
haven't yet got my head around all the details (and can't say some of them
in public anyway!) but IIUC as a result of the ongoing changes towards
MPEG-DASH the 'HD' files might only be available from Limelight as things
currently stand. Beyond that I guess it depends on how the step-by-step
changes are implimented.

Which for me mainly shifts my question to how I might be able to get a
reliable result from Limelight and avoid the crashes.

Dave L.'s reply came to me by direct email, but has ended up being quoted
here. In a nutshell IIUC he suggests my machine's network input is being
overpowered by the stream from Limelight. But as things stand I don't know
the details of the hardware for that in my machine. I do know it is a
recent purchase and otherwise very fast. And in practice fetching from
Akamai seems just as fast as Limelight (when it works!). And also radio
comes from either server with no problems thus far.

However it raises two questions in my mind:

1) Is there a way of getting gip to simply 'slow down' the process. In
effect ask for some input, then wait a bit until things are ready for it to
ask again? i.e. not go "flat out" but have a controllable way of reducing
or limiting the rate of transfers. Clearly when using the iplayer 'real
time' it runs at x1 rate, so I'm hoping this is possible and would then
allow me to access HDTV on Limelight without the many failures and
re-tries. Otherwise I may have to use it in the daytime so the sheer
traffic from others slows things down, with the hit that I then have it
count against my 'cap'.

2) Why would Limelight be this fast when/if Akamai isn't? This has been the
case for a long time now. The failures when accessing via Limelight have
happened her long before the changes of the last day or two.

Jim

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