I don't watch much telly.

Actually, I should eleborate on that. I actually use my nice new telly quite a lot, but I don't watch a great breadth of TV programmes. In fact, my telly usage seems to mostly boil down to glancing at the BBC News, giggling at Top Gear repeats on Dave when I'm having lunch, and watching DVDs or other recorded filmic media.

Nonetheless, a couple of weeks ago I was alerted that something that I quite wanted to watch would be broadcast on BBC Two on a Sunday evening (I think). It was, again, a Top Gear episode, but one of the newer ones, and it looked quite interesting. "I must remember to watch that" I said to myself.

But of course, as someone who never actually makes an 'appointment' with the telly, I forgot about it and missed it. This was mildly irksome – the one occasion that I actually wanted to watch a TV programme, I managed to cock it up. But then I had a thought – why not just watch it on this BBC iPlayer thing that everyone has been going on about?

Now I had used BBC iPlayer a couple of years ago, as a 'beta tester', and I had concluded that it was a clunky unreliable piece of shit, and subsequently ignored it. But more recently it seemed that loads of people were using it with great success, and I had been reliably informed that the current implementation was vastly superior to the crappy beta version and that it was really rather good these days. Well, why not give it another go? I could even install it on my 'Windows XP Media Centre' laptop (which is a whole separate post on shitty-things-that-don't-work-properly in the making) and thus watch it through my nice big telly.

So here is the story of my attempt to get BBC iPlayer to work...

I went to the BBC iPlayer website and found the Top Gear episode that I had missed. I decided that, due to my erratic (i.e. slow) broadband connection, I should opt to download the program for 'offline' viewing rather than attempting to watch it streamed in realtime. So I clicked on the nice helpful 'Download' button, to be told that I needed to install the BBC iPlayer Download Manager. Fair enough.So I downloaded and installed the Download manager, and restarted Firefox for good measure. Then I went back to the website, found the Top Gear episode again and clicked on 'Download'.

This time I was told that I needed to install the latest version of Windows Media Player. Hmmmph. Time to have a look at my Windows Media Player installation. It was version 11. Microsoft's website told me that this was indeed the latest version, but I decided to download and re-install it again, just in case. This took some time, and involved an unamusing diversion where I had to argue with the 'Windows Genuine Advantage' spyware validation in order to be permitted to download what I already had installed.

Following the inevitable reboot, I returned to the BBC iPlayer website (again), found the Top Gear episode (again) and clicked on 'Download' (again). And, again, I was told that I needed to install the latest version of Windows Media Player. I said some very bad words indeed at this point.

Once I had stopped grinding my teeth, I resolved to find out what iPlayer's fucking problem was. As as always with such things, I started by asking Google. Google didn't have much to tell me, other than the fact that lots of clueless n00bz** don't even bother trying to read the text of an error message before they (metaphorically) throw their stupid podgy hands in the air and run around wailing that "it dosnt werk"***. So, in true RTFM spirit, I tried looking at the help/support pages on the BBC iPlayer website, which initially pointed me towards some nonsense about clearing DRM caches or somesuch idiocy that only applies to Vista, before slyly mentioning that the download manager is not compatible with PCs running Windows XP Media Centre. WTF? How can it be that the BBC have developed a media application that works with practically every PC in the UK, apart from those that are explicitly designed to work with media?

Deep breath. There might be another way. In my various trawlings around the BBC iPlayer website I had stumbled across something named 'iPlayer Desktop', which (as the name would suggest) is a desktop application version of iPlayer, being made available as a 'labs' (i.e. beta) application. The advantage of this, from my perspective, was that it offered another mechanism for downloading programmes, seemingly not encumbered by the stupidity of the main BBC iPlayer infrastructure. All I needed to do was to sign up to iPlayer 'labs', download the app, and hey presto. And, of course, it would definitely be that straightforward...

So I signed up to 'labs', and read the help text like a good boy. It told me that I was now a 'labs' tester, and that the 'labs' application would automatically install itself when I first tried to download a programme from the iPlayer website. Excellent. So I went to the iPlayer website (again), found the Top Gear episode (again) and clicked on... nothing. There were now no fucking download links at all. Time for a beer.

Beer normally makes everything better. But when I returned to my personal iPlayer hell, I discovered that even the magical problem-solving properties of beer were struggling with the situation. Back in the help/support pages on the website, I found some well-hidden information regarding how I needed to have something known as 'Adobe Air' installed. Much as I hate client-side bloatware, which this did appear to be, I was now emotionally committed to this war of attrition, and so I located, downloaded and installed what seemed to be some horrible application-management browser plugin. Urgh.

Restarted Firefox (again). Went to the iPlayer website (again). Found the Top Gear episode (again). STILL NO FUCKING 'DOWNLOAD' OPTION. Back to the help/support pages again, to be told (in small writing on a well-hidden page) that "not all iPlayer programmes are available for download with iPlayer desktop".

At this point I did what I should have done in the first place, and used 'other' means to download and watch a video of the Top Gear episode. Is it any wonder that people use 'unapproved' methods to download content when the 'approved' methods are so patently painful?

I'm sure that my experience of BBC iPlayer must be quite atypical. It's reported that iPlayer is hugely popular in the UK, which would imply that lots of people are using it without too much difficulty. But nonetheless, if someone with a degree in 'computer science' (albeit a rather shitty one) and a baker's dozen of years' experience of working in coding can experience this many challenges getting a widely touted end-user application to work properly, I would suggest that the iPlayer team still have a lot of work to do on their 'corner cases'.

...

Well, that wasn't very interesting, was it? After four weeks of bloggy silence, is this the best I can come up with? Maybe not, but I feel better for having got it off my chest anyway.