The iPlayer website used to have a button to change the size of the video on live streams. When at the normal size, the bitrate was 800 kbps. When at the larger video size, the bitrate was 1.5 Mbps.

I'm watching BBC Two live now and the button to change the size/quality of the video is gone. The stream is now 480 kbps and apparently this can't be changed.

What happened and why?

I've just noticed this too - it's not just on the live stream either. "Recorded" programmes are the same.

It gets worse. Looks like what they've done is roll out the News Player client across the board. Which could be understandable - if it wasn't for the fact that quality is now locked to what your chipset can run... and the transport-controls-on-slide-up logic also interacts with the removal of Stage Video acceleration from Flash 11 for Linux.

I've tested on both my netbook (Lenovo Ideapad S12, Intel Atom N270 - 1.6GHz, NVIDIA ION, Ubuntu 10.04LTS, all updates) and primary laptop (Lenovo Thinkpad R61i, Core Duo, Intel X3100 graphics, Ubuntu 10.04LTS, all updates).

I tested with World's Strictest PArents - the video stream froze while audio continued happily on the netbook, while it happily plays out on the laptop - this looks like it's down to Adobe's poor coding. Already phoned and complained - the fastest way to resolve would be to back out the change to the Flash playback client until such time as Adobe have got the Stage Video stuff behaving properly under all platforms.

I reiterate -

Thinkpad R61, Ubuntu 10.04, Flash 11, Intel graphics - AOK, even with status visible

Ideapad S12, Ubuntu 10.04, Flash 11, NIVIDIA ION with accel on (CPU doesn't have the grunt otherwise) - video froze several minutes in, especially if you want to see where you are in the programme.

The issue seems to be that they have stepped away from the concept of iPlayer being in effect a "video recorder" - transport controls always visible, therefore less likely to interact with bugs in Flash to do with overlaid graphics on video; while this is adequate when playing a 2-minute clip in the context of reading a longer article, it defeats the purpose completely when watching long-form content - which is a bit of a UI change.

Actually - I also had to clear all the iPlayer cookies out as I had the larger window selected - in order to get the video content to play *at all*... audio wasn't an issue.

Beeb, if you're watching, please could you back this change out until Adobe gets their act together?

UI complaints - loss of large/small playback options.. please backout playback change.

I don't know if the BBC read this, but please can we go back to having the choice about which res to run at. I seem to spend most of the time at the lower res now, but I used to watch perfectly happily at the higher one before - why can't we have the choice as we used to- it could easily be an option so people who prefer the new method can keep it - then we could all be happy

BBC - This is a very big step backwards- there are many of us who can make an informed choice about this.

They also really ought to go back to having the "transport controls" underneath the video window - it'll interact less with regressions in Adobe's code... and functions they've ripped out while waiting on other elements in the Linux video chain...

Would also isolate issues between UI controls and actual playback..

So is this new player supposed to automatically choose the bitrate then? If so, it's terrible at doing this since I have an extremely high end PC and BT Infinity (40 Mbps), yet I'm only getting 480 kbps video!