Is anyone else feeling frustrated with the Freesat iPlayer capacity?

I have a Humax HDR, with Doctor Who series linked, and hit the silent disk full recording failure ten days ago. (My Ferguson Freeview PVR just deletes the oldest thing when the disk is full, a better policy IMHO.) So ten days ago I missed the first of the Angels two part-er.

I have since tried to watch the first part on iPlayer three times now, and not had success.

First time "lost connection" on the Humax, and after ten minutes faffing around, watched something else.

Second time programme started, then I paused it for half an hour to make a meal, but the picture froze on restart needing a reboot, after which I couldn't get a sensible response from iPlayer, until eventually I hit "lost connection" again. Watched something else.

Third time, I tried on the PC, and even there, I couldn't get Doctor Who - servers busy, try later. Started a download, but it still hadn't completed 3 hours later, so still haven't seen the programme.

Is there an issue with server capacity at the supply end? I am trying to watch a popular show at peak time, might expect there to be, since we need a separate stream for each user. Given that Freesat iPlayer is still in Beta, this isn't encouraging.

Other users seeing problems?

Remember that there are a lot of links between you and the iPlayer servers - it could equally well be ISP related issues too.

That said, I wouldn't be at all surprised if the system will quietly drop a connection if you just start playing and pause for half an hour. A few minutes, perhaps, but that long?

Imagine - a system has enough resources to stream to a set number of clients. When it reaches that number, it won't stream to any more. You press pause and wait indefinitely.... what happens next? If operating at the limits, to ensure you can resume playback whenever you want, then it would have to refuse connections from new people, even though you're not actually streaming. Otherwise, what happens? You come back, resume, and it has to drop someone else who's watching.

Planning is everything in this; if there was massive over-capacity built in, people would complain about that, saying it's waste. There has to be some compromise between utility and fairness. And I would say dropping a connection after you've paused for half an hour would be entirely fair; it shouldn't need a reboot, of course.

Since you can skip forward, that seems a lot more sensible than tying up a limited stream that you're not actually watching, for long enough that someone else could watch the whole of another programme.

Depending on how errors are reported, it's also possible that a 'servers busy' message might not actually mean iPlayer is too busy; sometimes, it's hard to tell the difference between, for instance, a server that's just going too slowly to be usable, and packet loss between you and it, down to a third party.

what's that? Do you mean that your disk was full so it didn't record?

Rarely. About as often as my ISP struggles (which is also rarely). So I've always assumed it's an ISP/internet issue, not a BBC-specific issue.

It would be nice if the bitrate adapted automatically to match the connection - then there would be no need to select LQ/HQ manually (unless you wanted LQ to reduce your internet usage).

Cheers,
David.

Certainly do mean that. Humax seem to have taken the opposite view to Access Devices about what to do when a scheduled recording occurs when the disk is full. Personally I'd rather it deleted something old (my disk goes back >3months) and unprotected, rather than not recording the new thing - but you've got to do one or the other.

The latest hdr firmware has the option to delete oldest recordings to make room for new ones automatically.

Menu/Recording/Auto Delete

I think the option to set this up is the best way. Obviously people who can't manage the capacity of there PVR would be the first on here complaning that "My Humax has deleted a programme that I wanted to watch without warning" if auto delete was the only (or even default) option.

Never had an issue with iPlayer - probably down to connection rather than Humax or BBC.