Does BBC iPlayer work? Not well, on the N900 pre-release…
by admin on Nov.11, 2009, under Demo Videos
This MobileDeveloperTV video shows the N900 running on WiFi. The presenter brings up Google and searches for BBC iPlayer.
Everything goes fine until he clicks “Play”. There’s a bit of buffering, after which only one or two frames per second are displayed. He clicks “Pause”, which takes quite a few tries because it’s a tiny button and he’s not using a stylus.
In fullscreen mode it’s a similar story. If anything, the frame rate is slower. YouTube plays fine, but iPlayer must be pumping out higher bandwidth video.
One solution would be a dedicated N900 iPlayer application, but we might find that when the Flash 10 upgrade arrives the playback has improved sufficiently that a dedicated app isn’t needed.
The web browsing and YouTube examples, by the way, look crisp, slick and smooth.
