It’s a multitude of immense bouts of stupidity. It only works on Windows, so first, being that I tossed out my boot camp installation a few months ago I kicked up Parallels, which I have a pretty standard XP install on.  So that’s stupidity #1.

First had to sign into the site with my beta invite login.  Here’s stupidity #2, the beta ID wasn’t my iPlayer Login, it was just to access the page where you sign upto iPlayer.  So I had to created yet another login.

Once i’d got a login I choose a show to download.  Ironically the big show on the iPlayer page that day was one of those celebrating Stephen Fry’s 50th, I say ironically because he’s a well known Mac advocate, even going as far as saying he hates windows and Microsoft in general with a passion.  So I choose that one.

It then gave me a sorry message because my system had failed the check list.  Oh I can’t use firefox. Stupidity #3.

So, in Internet Explorer now, tried again.  Chose the same show, this time I got 4 happy green ticks.  Yay…oh, not yay.  Despite the ticks my set up is still wrong, it tells me to look at the point with a red X.  Cept they’re all ticks.  All happy green ticks.  Stupidity #4.

Googled my problem and discovered it’s so specific that I need Media Player 11.  No mention of this by the beeb.  So upgraded Media Player and tried again.  Stupidity #5.

So logged back into the site again, chose the Stephen Fry thing, then guess what.  I’m still not ready, I now have to download iPlayer. Why the heck didn’t the process begin with this?  Stupidity #6.

So I installed iPlayer, went back to the site, chose the Stephen Fry thing.  It then added the show to the iPlayer apps download list.  Pheeeeww.  Ah, not much is coming though.  Left it for a good hour.  Still 0%.  Stopped the download and restarted it.  Nothing.   Stupidity #7.

Life is too short.

If I was the BBC I’d immediate scrap the iPlayer and sack everyone involved.  Just put the shows on an infrastructure already established.  iTunes, or maybe even Joost. It’s simply a waste of resources and license payers money to construct your own.  Just stop it now.  Please.

The other day the beeb displayed on our video display devices the panarama episode about scientology.

It’s the one where John Sweeney “loses it”.  They kind of *in so many words* confess that they only included the controversial scene in the broadcast  because it’s all over youtube.

But heck, they have no reason to be ashamed, if I had to deal with these people I would have done much worse.

It wasn’t the deepest of investigations, it barely even penetrated the surface, but what it did display was the lengths at which the cult goes to to suppress information about themselves.

The BBC journalist was literally followed, and spied upon everywhere he went.  There was an undercover scientology guy hanging around the reporters hotel, appearing behind him at every meal and following him in a car.

Every time the reporter interviewed someone with a tail to tell about the cult this creepy guy appeared out of the shadows to tell the reporter the persons life story in order to discredit him.

If I had been the BBC reporter I would have feared for my life.

The documentary is important because the cult are trying to relaunch themselves in the UK.  Despite having failed numerous times to be officially recognized in the UK as a religion.

It was comic relief over here last friday, nice thing about eyetv, well, any tivo type affair is that you can set it off at the start of these charity palavers and spin through it later in search of any nuggets (there weren’t any.)  Each hour or 2 of comic relief is hosted by a different presenter, the likes of graham norton and chris evans and they were all hopeless, until the last hour, some time after midnight in the wee hours.  Russel Brand took over and he completely owned the screen, he put his all in it, spitting out funnies left right and centre.  It makes me wonder, with such a disparity between the talent of these presenters, how do the lesser ones warrant such payment.  How did they even get on TV in the first place?

Rocketboom showed a clip from the BBC Two comedy “Look around you” yesterday and didn’t seem to realise, I think they might have even thought it was from a genuine science experiment. Silly billy’s.  It was from the first season of the show, which I recommend everyone to grab the DVD of.  But avoid the 2nd season which was a “Tomorrows World” spoof and was pants.

The massive problem I was reporting with creeping latency was resolved by updating my EyeTV software from 2.3.2 to 2.3.3, I was a little miffed that I had to be told about the new version because the software is supposed to be self updating.  Grr.

There is still a small amount of latency naturally, but it is now unnoticeable in almost all 2 games I have lol.

But, when I downloaded Super Mario Brothers from the virtual console the latency issue came back, albeit it in a slightly different flavour.

In super mario bros. after playing for about 30-60 seconds the controls begin to feel heavy, and jumping becomes difficult to judge.  But what’s different to what was happening in all things in 2.3.2 is that after minute or less the software seems to realise the problem and catches up with a sudden jolt. It’s then perfectly playable for a further minute or so, before the latency creeps back again, it comes and goes the rest of the game.

Some of the older virtual console games have a particularly low resolution, which you can see from the 100% pixel crop of the screenshot.  So i’m now theorising that this exotic video mode could be confusing the de-interlacing in EyeTV.  Occasionally if I switch to composite from Tuner mode whilst this mario game is running the output goes nuts, flickering like crazy as if it can’t quite work out how to deal with it.  So I turned de-interlacing off, the latency issue is lesser but still happens.  Still, i’m sure there’s something about this old NES resolution thats confusing things
Again, this is now restricted to just super mario bros. (that I know of).  It’s most interesting!

Another thing, apparently S-Video looks better on the EyeTV software than Composite does, but unlike most other console’s that I’ve known, the Wii doesn’t come with S-VIDEO. Even worse, you can’t even buy the cable here in the UK.  I dunno why, they have them in Japan, just not here.  Double Grr.