As buffering is not visible on the Hummy, does buffering continue during a pause in playback? Also, although Iplayer is still in Beta, I hope the Humax screensaver will ultimately kick- in during pause, and that the control interface ff/rew etc. map over to the same buttons as those used for a normal freesat recording.

I think I can answer my own question. The lights on my homeplug flash rapidly when an Iplayer video is playing. Upon pausing, it flashes once every several seconds. I therefore reckon that whilst paused, Iplayer doesn't download media. That's pretty cool, as I wouldn't want to start watching a show, deciding after several minutes that I didn't like it, but having downloaded all of it anyway. Of course, I may be wrong, but with no download progress bar (only play), it's anyones guess.

It has been confirmed by Humax and the BBC that there is NO buffering of the iPlayer data stream. Many would like it (especially to download even higher quality pictures overnight) but it is not going to happen - rights issues and lack of control in the HDR (they can't time limit it like they can on a PC).

There must be some buffering into RAM as it would be impossible to play a video stream over IP without.


Frank

You're confusing buffering and storing.

Buffering happens automatically in order to play the content, storage is not allowed.

Not quite! It would be quite possible for iPlayer to buffer content to a scratch file on the HDD to smooth over any network glitches that might happen. My understanding is that it does not do this!

It buffers to RAM, which is much better than buffering to the HDD.

Bob_cat confirmed the fact that it buffered to RAM at some poin before.