The BBC only allow download rights to Windows Media Video users.

This decision raised quite a few eyebrows and complaints from Apple and Linux users last year because those who paid the licence fee but did not have a Windows machine couldn't use this option. Very bad idea indeed to focus on a technology tied to only one OS. While I could accept Quicktime instead of WMV to allow DRM access for Apple and Windows users, it still put Linux users out. Until we can get a DRM option for all three OS I don't think you'll see a download option coming soon.

Well Youtube doesnt officially let you download its videos yet we all do.
If BBC's iPlayer uses flash than we should be able to work something out to no?

No. Same reason as before - iPlayer does not work like YouTube. They both use Flash to display video, but that's the only similarity - the protocol and decompression behind the scenes is completely different.

Sounds a bit illegal to me. I think better to work with the BBC to find a solution.

You can always use your PVR ;-)

i understand now ...

I live in the UK so can access BBC's iplayer and it works on the N800 but I would not feel you are missing anything as it is to choppy, for me at least to enjoy.

It's the choppy nature of the problem, I understand seems to be out of our hands presently. :-(

It's a very big shame as it was one thing I hoped to enjoy when my new N810 arrives shortly.

I have mplayer, mediabox and canola2 installed and a few other media codecs, and iPlayer DOES work** in maemo browser with the standard flash plugin.

** When I say "work", the audio's great, the video runs about about 1 frame every 2 seconds, and slowly drops out of sync with the audio. Meanwhile the CPU hits 100% and the tablet all but freezes until you terminate maemo browser.

The N8x0 has a hardware decoder for MPEG4? and DivX, but cannot handle the CPU requirements of the codecs that iPlayer is using :-(

Re-encoding video at 400x240, 29fps, 44KHz 128Kbps mp3 audio using DivX5.0 with "SUPER" works an absolute treat. You can fit about 7-8 feature length films on a 4Gb card, and watch them at full frame-rate with decent quality audio, and the CPU averages 25-40%, meaning you can eek out 2 full length films + a bit of wifi surfing at the airport!

"Internet Tablet" - not as defined by the BBC, but for surfing, IM, VoIP and audio/video from SD cards, works nicely.

Has anyone else noticed that if you try to watch youtube content in browser it's choppy, but if you let it cache the entire vid first it's better? Canola2's youtube plugin works very well though, hint hint!

Mark

there are various scripts around which will download the iplayer video file for iphone for you, you simply need the program ID to make it work, the core function simply spoofs the iPhone's useragent. I use one of these all the time to download programs and I play them back on my chipped (original) xbox running xbox media centre.

it shouldn't be too hard to use one of the many video encoder tools to transcode the video to make it run OK on the tablet, but there would be some loss of quality.