I am running my Wii on an 801n wireless network, I know the network is working well enough, but on Iplayer, I am getting problems with buffering and the message insufficient bandswidth.

Its not just me that is frustrated but my family as well, I am computer literate and my degree is in Computer Science, everything I have tried is to no avail.

Is there an update that can resolve this problem, or would it help to plug in a portable hard drive to solve the problem.?

Your help would be appreciated.

Regards

Joseph

That said, I like it and support the dev team’s efforts in improving it. I would like to see 480p video, and perhaps a little more care over encoding of the streams (I just watched last night’s EastEnders and in a few static scenes there are MPeg video blocks running across from left to right where the HDelta has obviously gone wrong in the encoding!)

Being a developer myself, I can sympathise with the guys who posted here. What you other guys don’t know is the complexity and structure of the BBC’s systems or the design philosophy behind the architecture. Coding something like iPlayer is a lot more complex than writing a program that runs on a PC. This is essentially a software dumb terminal that has to interface with a potentially very complex database through various layers which may or may not be within the control of the Wii iPlayer developers. It’s most likely that the separation of concerns – at a software and management level – is such that it’s not a simple case of converting the XML prior to the downlink. I fully expect that the dev team we’ve seen here have been given a protocol to communicate with a larger system, and that the – potentially hugely bloated – XML is all they can get, and then the only software they’re allowed to put out is for the Wii, let alone anything that could be deployed on the BBC’s server farm.

In response to the dev team: Have you thought about approaching the owner(s) of the XML-providing service regarding Binary XML? It would be a much smaller download and should be much quicker to process if you can find (or write) a decent library.

I suspect the buffering issues aren’t related to your connection. The BBC are still “tweaking” their side to try and ensure sufficient bandwidth as needed, but its still on-going. And don’t forget that whereas your PC or Xbox has a hard drive for storing buffered data, the Wii doesn’t.

Unfortunately whilst there is a vast improvement on the iPlayer for Wii (which I like very much) I keep getting buffering pauses which are rather annoying. I know my ISP does not have issues as suggested elsewhere and my home network is fine and dandy.

Any other ideas please?

Chris

During off peak times contention won’t be an issue so everything works OK, but in busy times your 700kbps stream gets squeezed down to an unworkable level. There will be only so much the BBC can do to alleviate this, mostly will be down to your ISP and their contention policies.

This will also impact the upcoming Canvas project, which will likely use higher streaming rates (1.5Mbps), so the industry needs to come up with a solution here. Potentially the ISPs could provide a special “Canvas Ready BroadBand” package, that fixes contention issues, also potentially applying QoS parameters to your line to guarantee the throughput. This might cost a few pounds a month – equivalent to an XBox Live subscription, or could be bundled into a higher Broadband package. Obviously this could also be used by PS3/Wii iPlayer users as well to guarantee their experience on the TV.

I know that XML will take up a lot more storage because of those . A simple tab delimited structure will take up far less space, won’t need such parsers and would use less processing power.

A web app to convert from xml to tab delimited shouldn’t be too bad either. Obviously I can’t say “simple” because I don’t know the structure!

Some possible ideas which you probably thought of, but no harm me saying it…
1 – forget about transparent background – I am sure everyone would be happy with text on black line. I am sure this would take a lot less processing power because it just an overlay.

2. Can you not take advantage of storing files onto SD card if required?