I have been playing with the BBC iPlayer and I thought I would post my experiences with it and Media Center. First I think the BBC iPlayer is a great idea, being able to catch up with shows is a nice but who wants to watch TV on a PC monitor? So this is where I was hoping for some Media Center integration. The downloaded videos are WMV so I thought they would play in Media Center (which they do) so to get them to show in in Media Center I added the download folder "My Deliveries" to the videos section. Once the downloads had started I noticed it created another folder called "iplayer_live", so you can either add that as a watched folder or navigate to it each time. The next problem is that all the BBC channel logo videos get downloaded in to that folder so you get 16 videos added to the folder you don't need, then the next issue is the file naming the BBC use, so for e.g. A downloaded Pingu show is named "8000442_67744276_Selection_DOWNLOAD.wmv" which is not very helpful when trying to find the show. Once you start the playback it works fine but as it's a video and not a recorded TV file there is no Resume function. The quality is reasonable, the files are encoded at 672 x 544. The bit rate seems to depend on the show, which seems to range from 800kbps to 2200kbps and they look good on my TV. I was able to stream the files to other PCs in the house and it works fine on my Xbox 360 Extender. I noticed the Zune software will not play it or convert it to my Zune, that must be a DRM issue and something I will have a look in to.
So I think the service will work for me as I can watch it via an Extender but I would like the BBC to create a proper Media Center UI for the service (I am not holding my breath). I could live with the web UI if there was a Media Center UI for playback that worked like Recorded TV, maybe a clever developer will come up with one.
Anybody else using it with Media Center?