Yesterday the BBC released their version of the iPlayer optimised for use on TV-connected devices; the BigScreen interface, and made this the default interface for the Wii. This change was picked up by PS3 iPlayer and resulted in PS3 users being sent to this version, which isn’t ideal as there are a few incompatibility problems to that need to be ironed out.
For now I’ve switched PS3 iPlayer back to the normal PC version. The big question is which do you guys prefer? The easy-to-use minimal interface designed for use with a remote, or the more informative ‘traditional’ version? How about Steve’s idea of a button to switch between the two, or is there some sort of half-way-house that people would like?
Also, some great news from Anthony Rose’s blog post:
PS: We’re also working on bringing BBC iPlayer to Sony PS3, but we’re not quite there yet as the PS3 uses a slightly older version of Flash which doesn’t support some of the features used in our media player, and the very promising Flash 9 update now available on PS3 has some compatibility issues. Our Flash developers are working on it – stay tuned for updates.
Great news from the bbc blog. Hopefully it wont be too long.
I noticed last night when I tried to access ps3iplayer that none of the streams are working. Is this a recent developement?
I tried going the the bigscreen version of the official iplayer directly and too my surprise this works fine (www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/bigscreen). It has however got the limitations of flash 7 (limited content, lower quality, no buffering).
This does however answer your question above. Keep ps3iplayer pointing to the normal pc version. We don’t need a switch as users wanting the bigscreen version can simply go direct (www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/bigscreen) and bookmark.
Hi Mike,
Thanks for the feedback. The streams were working a few nights ago, so there may have been a few more changes since which could have knocked things out. I’ll take a look this evening.
Also occasionally the PS3 will just stop playing the streams and will need a full reset before it will play them again.
Mike I wanted to thank you from the bottom on my heart for the hard work. Cheers mate
I’m outside the UK so can’t use iplayer on my PS3. BUT I’d really like to listen to BBC Radio and I know that is not restricted to UK only (I listen on my laptop all the time). Is there any way of tweaking the ps3iplayer so that us expats could at least listen to BBC radio through our PS3s?
Thanks!!!