BBC iPlayer problems

Mattus · 17 Jun 2012 at 19:18

Has anyone else had problems with the iPlayer since it was upgraded to adjust the bitrate automatically during playback?

My connection is not great (3Mbps), but is pretty stable and should easily be fast enough to play the standard 1500kbps streams. But within 5 minutes of starting a video, the stream invariably switches from 1500kbps to 796 or even 480. After a few minutes it increases, but then yoyos back down again. It makes the iPlayer virtually unwatchable.

Nobody else is using the connection for downloading files - just for standard web surfing. Obviously this will affect the bandwidth sporadically, but I never had any problems with the previous iPlayer which only had the 1500kbps stream available. Whichever technology they're using seems to be too keen to lower the bitrate and too slow to raise it again.

Anyone else seen this, or know of a way of switching this adaptive streaming malarkey off?

KIA · 17 Jun 2012 at 19:54

Fine here. ISP?

Right click video > Toggle info console, will give an idea of CDN and bandwidth.

Mattus · 24 Jun 2012 at 17:23

ISP is Sky (proper Sky, not the Connect one!)

This is pretty standard. It was at 1500, and then I downloaded a 1MB file, which immediately dropped it to 796. Now it's been on 796 for at least five minutes and just isn't going up again, despite the available bandwidth being 2500.

KIA · 24 Jun 2012 at 17:47

You need to restart the stream if you want it to increase the bitrate. The idea of the variable bitrate is to find the highest stable rate without buffering, which is exactly what it did when the available bandwidth was reduced.

Mattus · 24 Jun 2012 at 17:50

Nah, it does increase eventually. It went back to 1500 about five minutes after my post. It's just far too sensitive decreasing it and not sensitive enough increasing it.

I know I can just restart it, but that means I have to restart the stream every time someone in my house uses the net, which is stupid. I had no difficulties at all before this so-called 'upgrade', where I could just choose the 1500kbps stream and it would leave it alone.