³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ

Is it right that full screen has a black border left, right and bottom?

The ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ is NOT the sole rights holder for the Olympics in the UK. Eurosport also has the rights and has done for years. Infact I prefer thier coverage because they have less talking heads and better picture quality. Eurosport will also be transmitting over 100 hours of the Olympics in 3D, putting the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ's pathetic 3D output to shame.

Forgot to mention that Eurosports 3D is live where as I understand the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ's will be delayed.

I would like to pick up on comment #1. I can see why there is a black space at the bottom - to fill in the stats and the extras and whathaveyou - and how this then forces the black bars on the sides in order to keep the video in the correct aspect ratio. But personally, I hate it. Half of the screen is wasted! Why can't the video be in full screen with the extras bit overlaid or when the extras twizzler is clicked, the video momentarily shrinks to the size it does currently and then goes back to full resolution when the extras is turned off again.

And just one more thing - I think the bit rate of 3.5Mbps may be too low for sporting events. Whilst watching the Helsinki athletics yesterday there was a lot of artifacting and blockiness on the video even though the on-screen graphics with the names and results was crystal clear. 3.5Mbps works perfectly for Wimbledon where there is very little movement in picture but I don't think it's enough for fast-paced events like athletic sprinting.

Thanks for taking the time to read my comment.

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Good to see the streams are in a good resolution, but are there any plans to improve the framerate? Even in 'HD' the framerate isn't great, with a much less smooth picture than a regular SD 'red button' stream. Also I have the same issue with black bars around the picture, using Google Chrome.

I am afraid that the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖs idea of what HD is different from the rest of the universe. The simple fact is that live HD is simply not possible at these low bitrates. It is possible to get much higher quality using software encoders and hand crafting the encoding. Unfortunatly not possibe with live transmissions.

I agree that the black lines in full screen are horrible. They have probably done this to make the resolution look better than it really is.

For several years now the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ has been too keen to cut quality in favor of bitrate on all platforms. I think the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ sees the internet as a cheap transmission medium in as much of the cost is paid by broadband subscription. The best way to watch these 24 channels will be by satallite kindly provided for by Sky. It will be interesting to see if SKys streams will be a higher quality than the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖs own HD channels.

Crashes on 64bit Windows 7 with Flash 11.3 r300 without playing any video

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Comments 4 and 5 pretty much sum up my experience. Love the little bar with key moments in, but not at the expense of 1/4 of the screen being permanently black.

Also, as with regular iPlayer, it keeps freezing and takes ages to restart. ITV's player, much as it's far more low tech, rarely if ever does this to me.

I was having a lot of reliability problems with it yesterday. I really do like the concept, but reliability needs improving. I'd say that the video played fine for about 4-5 minutes, then it'd pause for 10 seconds (buffering perhaps?) then it resumed for another 4-5 minutes or so. Then, suddenly and without warning, it'd change to a "This content isn't working, please try later" error - thus forcing me to refresh the page to get the player back. This must have happened about 4 times during the first half of the football alone.

My browser is Firefox, I have the latest patched version of Flash player, and I'm sitting on an 8mb Internet connection (that actually connects at 8mb).

Video plays with sound but no picture at all

It's a great player, but it doesn't zoom in a linear fashion with the rest of the content - at my default level of zoom I use on the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ site to accomodate a 1680x1080 screen on a 24" monitor with reasonable text size, I lose the controls and the bottom 20% of the video - I either have to have a wee postcard video, or full screen, neither of which lends itself to optimal viewing experience.

Possible minor bug: When not maximized on my 1400x900 laptop screen, the player cuts off the bottom of the screen, as per the image below.

I'm using the latest version of Firefox and Flash, and this doesn't happen on my desktop with the same setup, but higher res screen.



Apart from that, looking good :)

Just seen post #14. Mine turns out to be the same issue, as all pages are zoomed on my laptop... took the zoom off and the player window's normal again.

Have also noticed that a double-click doesn't toggle the maximize setting, which it does on the current iPlayer (and most players).

Post #13 I mean :)

Could the full screen for watching sports (ie for the Wimbledon tournament) be completely full screen so it maximises the screen size. At the moment there is still the URL bar and the bar with news, sports, weather etc. much appreciated. Also, when you go onto a live stream, for the first 20 seconds it is blurry before it gets more focused. Again much appreciated, thanks

Guys... why - in July 2012 - are you Beta-ing a new delivery system based on Flash?

There is an ever-increasing number of devices that do not support it, and - when you add the further hurdle of requiring compatibility with the latest version of Flash - as you've done, congrats - my computer is one of them.

HTML 5 has been here for ages for goodness sake, wake up & smell the Earl Grey.

Regardless of which, a national broadcaster having its delivery strategy for the Olympics dependent on having the latest version of a proprietary technology?
Come on, that is an accessibility fail of embarrassing proportions. What kind of a tinpot country are we living in?

It's remarkable to think the people behind this 'project' would think of it as an improvement. To make peripheral stuff like onscreen statistics a priority over the actual size of the picture is absurd. Now we have a stupid big black border on the bottom and sides of the screen making the picture at least 25% smaller, probably more. A disastrous change.

Getting good quality video on it & playback has been fine.

However I don't like that you can't go proper fullscreen, in fullscreen you still get black borders round the sides. thats one of the only things that i think needs changing, give us the option to go proper fullscreen without the borders like on the old live video player.

Audio plays with no video, as with post #12 and perhaps #8. Thanks ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ...

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With annual Blackberry sales in the UK alone of over 4 million, what does it say about the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ's public service remit that it does not provide these new streaming services for Blackberry users. Will the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ continue to privilege iphone and andriod at the expense of others?

Audio plays but no video... it appears a theme may be emerging.
Love the idea of skipping to different parts though. If only I could see them!

@Alex Perry
So the borders are to accomodate the Extras panel at the bottom. Your analogy with 4:3 films is flawed because though they have borders, they do not have borders on both the sides AND the bottom! That reduction in image size is just not acceptable nowadays, surely you can see that, yet we are not given the option of just watching the image without the extras. I'm not interested in enhancing my 'experience' - I just want to watch sport. You've actually taken away the viewer's ability to watch a proper full size picture - a major step back.

"the black bars in full screen are to accommodate the 'Extras' panel at the bottom"

Fair enough, However would it not be better to have an option where you can either have the extras bar & the smaller video or to turn the extras bar off & just have the fullscreen video.

In everything I've viewed using this player so far (F1 & Tennis) there has been no extra data to display at the bottom so no need for the video not to take up the full screen.

Good idea but it requires a bit of fine tuning focusing on picture quality and frame reload speed both which are, in my experience, not as good as the normal iplayer.

I found the quality of the video to be brilliant. One comment would be that as you make it possible to rewind and watch slightly behind live, when you move the mouse the bottom bar is revealed so it is not idea to put the bookmarks on there for goals which you haven't seen yet, if watching 'behind' live. Thanks, Ian.

Just tried the player again. I have 24" high def screens side by side one with the satellite picture and the other showing the test player. First this time there was no sound with 64bit windows 7. The definition was about the same as the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ 2 SD picture but with more artifacts. I also compared the picture with ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ HD and as I expect you know there was no comparison. The player cannot be described as HD and the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ should stop miss discribing this as HD.

The black lines are totally unacceptable. Full screen means full screen. I am amazed that this player is in such a poor state of development only 2 weeks before the event.

"18:59 UK time, Friday, 29 June 2012: We rolled it out fully today. So we wanted to take this opportunity to build a video player that would provide a lasting legacy to ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Online and our audiences in the years to come."

As of now (02:21 2 July 2012) your interactive player won't interact at all - something about "We are unable to bring you any video at this time, please try again later.". So when you say "The ability to pause and rewind live video or jump straight to key moments you may have missed by using chapter markers" should you have added "providing you start watching before it's finished"?

As this is a roll-out of the finished (tested) product that will provide a lasting legacy, can you clarify what you mean by "Every sport available live and on demand in HD quality on every day of the Games"? Does that mean every sport or only just every OLYMPIC sport? If you had full, live coverage of F1 (for example) [which of course you don't] could I watch that on your new whizzy player? If so, why only during the olympics? If not, why not (leaving aside the fact that this is one of those increasingly rarer instances of ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ sport having rights that no-one else has)?

BTW, - when you say it has been tested - is real testing or just the sort that was done for the release of the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Sport website?

Can you expand on your concept of time and/or logic? When you say "For now you will be able to watch in HD quality once the bit rate ramps up" does that mean we can now (for now you will be able to) or cannot (once the bit rate ramps)?

I would also like you to explain how you know that, despite living in a city that is in the top 20 in country in size, I will be able to watch a 3.5 mbit HD stream with my 2 - 3 mbit ADSL service. When you say "For now you will be able to watch in HD quality once the bit rate ramps up" are you referring to my bit-rate available, your bit-rate available (averaged per user) or the capability of your system?

Given the predilection of ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ-types with the olympics and the amount of work (and money) that's gone into covering them (and flooding all channels), what do you think this large number of people will be doing by the end of the year?

Surely there's a self-evident case for a headcount reduction - unless the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ can dream up some other way to spend huge amount of our money?

31. At 21:19 2nd Jul 2012, I Want To Post wrote:

This comment is awaiting moderation. Explain.

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And yet ....

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All posts are reactively-moderated.

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So - What does this mean? Can someone explin to me please? Are they reactive or proactive?

Please please please give us the option of watching these events with the old player for those of us who do not like huge pointless borders on the screen and don't have the broadband speed to stream HD without choppy playback. Please don't ruin it by forcing this on us just three weeks before the event. I was really looking forward to using the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ player for the Olympics hooked up to my TV from the laptop, and now with these changes, I can't do that.

@30 Trev

The definition of HD is just that the images need to be a higher resolution than SD and iPlayer HD meets this definition. There are no HD standards for internet HD services.

The ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ HD bitrates are comparable with many other online commercial HD services: . It is generally accepted that online-HD has a lower quality than broadcast due to the network capacity.

³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ iPlayer Desktop.... is dead... New 'interface' so will assume it got updated somehow... but none (and I do mean NONE) of the buttons work now... All my programmes are wiped... won't even let me add a programme from iPlayer? What's going on?

I did manually update Adobe Air - thinking that may help... nada...

Hope it gets fixed before Silverstone! :-/

The flash players settings aren't storing anything, so I think this is at least partly why there is too much stopping and buffering going on. BTW I am using Windows 8 Consumer Preview with the latest Flash Player update on Google Chrome.

The video player doesn't scale properly when you zoom in on the web page with Control+Scroll Wheel. All other ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ video services can resize themselves fine, including iPlayer. It works fine in full screen, but I'd like to be able to watch the normal view without half of the video being cut off, including all of the bottom controls.

Oh dear. I'm not happy to read that the black bars are part of the design.

#32, that usually appears the first time someone posts on a blog, first posts are vetted.

Anyhow, wouldn't a better idea for the black bars being to squash the video up slightly ala the Channel 4 "next on channel 4" bar that appears at the end of programmes? Then it'll avoid both the overlaying of content but also the irritating postage stamp effect.

Course it does mean enduring a few moments of fattyvision but as it is only whilst you use the interactive gubbins it won't be like the time you go to a relatives house and sit patiently waiting for the moment they walk out the door so you can edit the settings on their sky box to stop it outputting a 4:3 cutout image to their HDTV.

Only me that does that? Not to worry.

My experience of watching the video has been good so far. However, I just found out that the new system is Flash-based... good God, why? My flash-blocker must have an existing "allow content from ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ" exception, or I'd be moaning that I couldn't even see your new content!

My other moan is about the navigation. I don't think it's particularly helpful to have rewindable video and live streams in the same place... it's just confusing. I've just watched a few minutes of Murray/Cilic warming up, until I noticed the clock was wrong and realised I was watching yesterday's coverage.

Finally... is there going to be a pop-out player? I'd like to be able to squeeze it into one corner of my screen (so I can, ahem... "work" at the same time, without having to resize a browser window to fit)

From a short experience, generally excellent. One thing that would make it better is to provide an open in a window option to allow me to resize it as I see fit. Good work.

Just like iPlayer set the standard for web-video, this raises it again. Great work!

I cannot see a picture on the player at all! Just the sound plays to a black screen. I've tried both Chrome and IE 9. I'm on 64 bit Windows 7 on a Dell laptop.

Similar issues to poster #11, getting constant issues with the video seemingly buffering, despite never having this problem with the old video player, definately having a fast enough connection, and not having anything wrong with my connection (I can for example watch other videos on the site, including iPlayer without any buffering). I'm actually finding it unusable which is a massive disappointment.
Even if it was working, it is really disappointing to see that the black bars around the picture are intentional!! Like others have suggested, making the extra data optional would have been much nicer, especially if the data will be like the screenshot shows (ie: information that would be on the actual video feed anyway)

I think the new player is fantastic and is definitely what we expect. Only problem I have at the moment watching wimbledon is the picture quality - my connection is nowhere near saturated yet the player has decided I have low available bandwidth and so provides me a highly compressed feed! Hope this is fixed in time for HD streaming!

Also using Windows 7 and getting no picture only audio. Using Firefox but tried Internet Explorer and Chrome and it doesn't work on them either. Downloaded the latest version of flash and that didn't help. And the turning off hardware acceleration option is disabled on my laptop so that doesn't really help either. Hope you'll sort this out soon as I can't watch anything now you've taken the old player away.

I am getting sound but no video as previous comments. As requested my information is as follows:

Your browser is:
Internet Explorer 7 on Windows XP
Your Browser Capabilities:
Flash 10.3 is installed

Also suffered from audio / no video with Win7-64 / latest Flash / IE9 or Chrome
Disabling hardware accelerator worked to fix it - using instructions in this link

@AndyB Thanks for that, that worked for me too!

Tried yet again tonight. When started got those horible black lines left, botton, and right. Clicked on "More video" and selected a video and I got a thick black line on the right and the "normal" black line on the bottom. No black line on the top or left.

Clearly the only way to watch these 24 channels in real HD will be satellite or on Virgin.

Is there some way to disable the bitrate handling and set it manually?
(e.g. for an unstable but fast connection it will ramp up to the maximum and then be forced to buffer frequently, or you might wish to keep it at a low bitrate when sharing an internet connection or dealing with download limits).

bbc should take a leaf out of skygo player and allow the user to adjust the bandwidth. i cannot watch skygo in the default auto nor the high setting but as soon as i've set it to the medium it works fine whatever sport/tv prog i'm watching. there is going to be a heck of a lot of disgruntled license fee payers unable to watch these videos because of the constant buffering problems like i've just experienced trying to watch the tennis.

Yeah I'm having the buffering problems too. I see now the picture starts up more detailed immediately, which is better than before, but really that's a marginal thing. We still have regular freezing of a stream that eats up your monthly download allowance much quicker than before for the privilege of seeing a picture that is a third smaller!
By all means make changes, but in the early stages you have to allow the option of using the standard format, otherwise some people will have trouble with their 'experience'.

This is very promising. :)

@Alex Perry-a couple of comments:-

I did try the player again yesterday and found that it was working a little bit better. There were still a few buffering issues, however, the stream didn't stop completely forcing me to refresh the page, so the experience was significantly better.

Regarding the black bars-why don't you put the video fullscreen and then scale it down if we optionally decide to display the extra data at the bottom of the screen?

The ability to rewind is a really nice feature, however, if play has finished on a specific court for the day access to the stream is then removed from the website, meaning you cannot view the earlier matchs played on that court. Is there any reason why the stream cannot be made available for a longer period of time?

Finally, I can replicate exactly what poster #53 is describing.

Hi
I get sound & no video with the new system. Turned on to watch the Euro Final having watched matches previously & couldn't. Annoyingly I could watch the goal highlights (2 at that point) from the home page, just not the match.
I have Win 7 64 bit, adobe air, 11 active X (dl today) but did not have a problem watching any sport video before the update.
Video on news site working as normal.
Internet explorer 9.
Disappointed to hear F1 will be on this new system too as I usually watch that as well; being bed bound my options are limited; although that said the quality of the output on the website and iplayer is usually so good it would be my first choice anyway.
Hope you get it fixed or advise me what to try to fix it.
Thank you

I disabled hardware acceleration & it works fine now. Can anyone tell me if having that disabled will adversely effect any other application that I hitherto used?
Thanks

All those who are getting audio but no video - I had exactly the same problem (on Google Chrome 20, IE9 and Firefox), and rectified it by updating my graphics card drivers.

I have an ATI Mobility Radeon HD5470 which had the latest Dell drivers on it, I updated to the latest generic driver from the ATI website.

Suddenly we can no longer view sport video on an Ipad. It was working earlier today. We can still watch other video. Any ideas?

Regarding the problem with the Ipad this has now been tracked down to a cookie put on Safari from the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ site. After this was deleted things went back to normal.

The new player is worse than the old one because it doesn't have full screen video.

Why don't you make the extras appear when you put the mouse pointer over the bottom of the screen? Then we could have proper full screen video.

I watched both F1 practice sessions today on a terrible broadband connection and it worked fine. The picture quality in full screen was good. There were frequent drop-outs but not as major as on the red button service.

There was quite a delay between the black box appearing and the actual video having a play option, but I think that is due to my connection.

I really like the new player, well done!

The black bars are a joke whatever the 'extras' may add the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ are forgetting that the main reason for watching sport is to see the action!

The picture quality has been excellent (before the launch proper) now it's been ruined by not offering proper full screen video.

I would like to know if it will be possible to watch the contents from Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, please

I have solved my audio/no video problem on my Dell Win7-64 laptop with a Radeon 5470 video card. Turing off the Flash hardware acceleration as suggested by Alex and AndyB (51) fixed the problem.
I also tried DJmarcy's fix (62) with the ATI video driver - the video worked fine with Hardware acceleration re-enabled.
Thanks for your help.

The black borders are really quite stupid and there must be at least an option to have proper full-screen like before. This so-called 'feature' is unethical from a technical point of view as well. Meaning that - if you do not play a video at it's proper width and height, for example, a 1280x720 video at 1234x678 the GPU (if hardware acceleration is enabled) or CPU (if acceleration is disabled or not available) has to work harder scaling the video to fit the non-standard width and height that the programmers of the ActionScript have defined. Therefore, this increases the chances of complaints of 'lag' from clients with low-specification hardware and quality distortion (pixellation for some clients and interpolation for others).

The player also causes video corruption on Macintosh computers which did not occur at the time the HD player was being beta tested for the first time in Formula 1 last year (2011). The latest Flash Player 11.3 causes corruption when the HD stream is initialized, but I found out recently that downgrading to Flash Player 10.x causes corruption on a lower quality stream. This is of course very strange behavior - most probably on Adobe's fault, but as usual, this might be an issue that would bounce from Adobe to Apple and back again, and I think we all know how good the relationship is between these two companies.

I think it is about time the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ started to adopt HTML5 as Flash is said to be phased out in the next few years. As an ActionScript and JavaScript programmer myself, I get less issues with JavaScript then I do with ActionScript, because I know that problematic code is my fault if run-time results occur on every client browser I test it with.

I also want to clarify my issue with the black borders. By 'black borders', I mean, the artificial reduction in video size by the programmers to accomodate this extra 'feature', not the natural scale of video size depending on aspect ratio of display device. I use a 2560x1440 (16:9 aspect ratio) display, and I expect any 16:9 content, wether it may be 640x360, 1280x720 or 1920x1080 to exactly accomodate every pixel of my display as it normally does, which currently - it does not.

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Be nice to try this but all I get is
'We are unable to bring you any video at this time, please try again later'.

Im on w7 and tried firefox, chrome and safari.

I loloked at the faq, but there wasnt much in there apart from some pretty lame tweaks, which seem more a fault of the webpage design than the user.
Didnt understand the tv license bit in there, must be error.

Will this be available on the ipad?

just tried this with the open golf this morning
looking good on firefox 14
it crashes on w7 using latest chrome browser though, when i clicked on extras.

shame this does not work with popout
the extras is a bit naff really. i like the rewind option and the channel changer (when olympics is live), but the extra information is not really needed and the extra interface is a bit odd looking design wise

another annoyance, when you change from one live video to another the volume resets, can your volume preference not be saved?
i was flicking to different open golf live action here /sport/live-video

Is there any way of accessing the iplayer when you are outside the UK?? I will be working during most of the Games and would really like to be able to access it live online.

It's great to see the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ providing the best ever coverage of the Olympic Games up to date and up to date with the latest modern technologies to show the Olympics on all platforms across the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ.

Hi!

Is this player available for Ubuntu Linux?

Can anyone tell me, will I be able to watch the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ coverage on my laptop via an internet link in a campsite in Bavaria?

At least you lot are getting something, all I get is 'not available in your area'!
Obviously ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ does not have exclusive rights, someone in my country does!
I'll have to go to one of those dubious web-sites which live stream a bootleg feed. Sounds like the pic quality will be better.

I just wish I could find the link so that I can get the service.

I have a couple of comments:-

1. I can't seem to find the function to rewind. WHat I want to be able to do is rewind sometimes only a few seconds to see an important bit again. The yellow time bar is very clumsy and as soon as you click on the white position button it jumps ahead and then it takes ages to find the correct position again. I would like rewind and fast forward buttons where i can see what is changing on screen which would help me find the exact position that i want to replay from.

2. Finding content for a previous day is not easy. The only way seems to be is to start playing something and then use the More Video button to search for it. I would rather have the ability to locate what I want to watch before starting the player.

Otherwise it is a good step forward.

Kenny

After my comments #60 & 61 just wanted to say I have been watching on my laptop live & various feeds & it has been brilliant. The picture quality sublime.
So thank you very much.

i am very thankful to bbc for the complete coverage of london olympics..i just pick that bbc is covering this olympics from

No programmes at all should be solely displayed in HD, there must ALWAYS be a standard definition version available. People who, like myself, live in the country who cannot obtain nor afford a high bandwidth connection cannot watch any HD programmes at all. I am disappointed that it is not completely obvious to the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ that they should always provide a lower definition service. Come on, think!

@88 Can you give any examples of this?