ITV Player

If there’s a crappier bit of software out there on the Interweb then I’ve yet to come across it. Lack of telly reception means the PC is our only way of watching the Tour coverage at night. The ITV4 highlights programme usually becomes available at about nine each night, but more often than not it just continually resets and then forces you to watch endless moronic adverts to get back to the point you left off.

Particularly annoying tonight with it being possibly the best stage of the race so far.

i tried complaining, even their complaints form does not work! ****.

I had similar problems before telling me the programme was not available. At least I got to see the finish I suppose…

It’s a temperamental beast. I managed to get Chasing Legends to play without it buffering once the other night.

Might be a silly question (my internet knowledge is rubbish), but if I start it, then put it on pause for ages to let it download, would that stop it hanging? Or is that of absolutely no relevance?

I was going to try Chasing Legends, but thought it pointless. Will maybe give it a try though.

if I start it, then put it on pause for ages to let it download, would that stop it hanging?

This used to work for 4OD for us up in Belmont on our wet-piece-of-string excuse for broadband…

I’ve watched it live (at work) for the last couple of days and I don’t think it stalled once. I know we have quite a good internet connection so maybe that’s important?

Rachel

yep, it’s a total heap. And i have the same ITV4 lack of reception problems.
And you cant watch the TDF highlights on the ITVPlayer using an iPhone or PS3 due to rights restrictions. Hopeless.

It’s also crap on linux. It just works intermittently, choosing not to work most of the time. You may be thinking “ah, but you’re using linux, it’s your own fault”, but I can’t think of any other video streaming sites that have issues. For that matter, I’m in the ridiculous situation of having to watch illegal streams I shouldn’t even need to go near, just so I can get my tour fix.

+1 to all the above really.

Internet speed really shouldn’t matter as their streams are served using a third party CDN. You’d have to have pretty poor bandwidth &/or latencyfor that to fail. I think the problem is a combination of overloaded backend servers (not the ones serving the content – thats a CDN, just the metadata etc) & the player that’s just spectacularly badly written. The player doesn’t seem to cope with basics like seeking forward in a stream, it resets itself.

I finally got to watch Chasing Legends the other night only by watching at gone midnight.

Tip that works for me sometimes. When it says that the program is no longer available, remove ITV’s cookies & LSOs & reload the page. Also, by using privoxy as my front end proxy, I don’t get to see the adverts 🙂 Shame it doesn’t work for the live stream.

I really wish get_iplayer would work with ITV again.

re: pausing to allow it to buffer

this can work/help but it wont buffer the whole program, only up to the first ad break

Its 5H1T, ive complained to ITV, possibly two years ago now, they said the problem was my end!

It was testing my patience last night.

First it did the ‘hilarious’ play 1 second/buffer for 20 seconds thing then when it restarted, I had two copies of the audio delayed by about 1/2 a second so it sounded like I was watching the programme in a cave.

Decided to stop the whole thing and start it again, bastard didn’t resume from the same point and wouldn’t let me seek forwards, so I had to just put it on silent and let it run for 45 mins to get back to where it was before.

Works OK for me, though the quality is pretty bad. I like that you don’t get any ad breaks other than the boardman idents. Annoying that you can only buffer up to that point though.

I don’t bother with ITV player anymore – and I only used it a few times. EVERY time it’s laggy, constantly stops to buffer, the picture quality is cack, audio and video get out of sync, I’ve had the two audio streams slightly delayed issue as well. nightmare.

iplayer works a treat – all credit to the beeb really for making that so good.

The reason you can only buffer up to the ad break is because they serve it up in discrete chunks. The ads are served at the start of each chunk.

It seems to fail more often for me whenever it has to go to the backend to ask for the CDN location for the next chunk.

us a different browser

Agreed, it’s awful – have no trouble with iPlayer, 4OD, even the channel 5 one, but the ITV player is consistently poor.

For watching the highlights, try tvcatchup, works a treat for me, and much better than the “watch live” option on the ITV website

Tonight I tried pausing for 5 minutes after every ad break to let the buffers fill up (if that’s the correct terminology) and it seemed to work fine. Might just have been a co-incidence of course.

I have the same issues when using the player at home: repeating, pausing (stopping more like), not seeking, etc. BBC iPlayer is significantly better. The ITV player works fine at work though…

Another dumb thing about the ITV website is they sometimes use an image of the stage winner crossing the finish line for the programe’s tumbnail! I’ve only seen it happen once this year – and it was later changed – but still anoying.

I download a torrent for tonight’s show.