BBC iPlayer on Virgin Media

[quote="NickyS"]

News is slightly different though, its a live show whereas things like Doctor Who are nicely packaged up before being put on the system.

Previously on on-demand drama shows would involve a trailer or three, then ident with anno, and then have a credit squeeze and anno and then cut off three seconds before the endcap.

I suspect the News Channel programmes are recorded from the News Channel network feed, as Red Bee won't have copies of the shows delivered to them as the News Channel (along with BBC Parliament) are services that don't use Red Bee for playout, and so the programme tapes aren't sent to Red Bee for TX.

Red Bee are responsible for providing most of the iPlayer content AIUI - and for the main BBC Networks they will have feeds of live programmes and programme master tapes to encode from. However as the News Channel doesn't use Red Bee for playout - the News Channel is presumably treated separately. I doubt News send a separate tape copy of their programme for iPlayer encoding.

Talking of news, has anyone noticed the fabulously OTT ident they have for news channel programming? It's essentially the last 20 seconds of the countdown with the title sequence playing twice. I wonder if there is a reason for such long idents.

No idea how these things work over cable, but could it be acting as a buffer while the main programme is "downloading"?

to my knowledge it's more like a dumb terminal setup where you're playing the show on their end and it's them broadcast.

That reminds me of the horrid lies 4OD comes up when you stream shows, claiming it's helpfully showing you adverts to save you from boredom whilst it buffers the video...even though it's a completely linear playlist and won't be doing anything of the sort until the ads are done. Must they be so apologetic about it?

just seen this video on you tube of the iPlayer and the start of an Eastenders episode.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y62e2s7Mt8c

Yes, the boxes are just DVB-C recievers, they don't have any memory for storing programmes.

It's like having a DVD player at the end of a very long wire... I press pause on my remote here and the playback stops at the cable headend. Essentially it's my own little channel

I found this post today explaining the system.

Where exactly is the head end located? Is it before or after those green cabinets in the street?

My understanding is that the head-end is more centralised than that - but is connected by fibres, not coax, to the cabinets in the roads.

The Radio Frequency DVB-C feed is created from the fibre feeds at the cabinet AIUI.

Suspect there is a group of common frequencies allocated to the main channels, which are provided to all houses, and a block of frequencies that are split between houses in a street - with each household (maybe even each box in a household) having a dedicated chunk of DVB-C space in that road/cabinet feed to carry iPlayer/VOD style content.

Might have seen this for yourself on other programming but only got to toy with it yesterday so the content will be gone by now.

Anyway, whilst trying to watch the Election coverage, it didn't play out Bikes as it usually does before BBC One content but instead plays out Forest. Not so weird you may think but when the ident completes you get a iPlayer outro sting pretty much the same as the intro, no other content has the outro be it at the end of the ident or the programme itself. Isolated incident as nothing else which aired on the same day which aired on BBC One earlier had it, weirdy weird.

Something for you to try as it's a constant through all shows and a bit of a headscratcher for me. If you rewind back to the start of any programme (which is very likely if like me you wanted to see that looped BBC News ident again as you haven't really seen it properly) notice that the sting starts much earlier on than before and for whatever reason will consider the programme to have ended where the ident ends. Any reason why this is?

Apparantly, I must inform you that this post was written entirely by Nini. Apart from this sentence and the last.

EDIT again: I did originally post it without the credit as I wanted it to be some sort of 'in joke' for those who read Metropol. Silly, I know. Never mind.

The Headend is the centre that contains all the equipment to supply the various services - TV/Radio channels, internet servers etc. The green boxes just take the (normally fibre optic) cable that comes from the headend and splits/converts it for all the properties around it.

Think of it like an electricity company - the green boxes are like the sub stations and the headend like a power station