[mikkiet]

Has anybody recently tried to use BBC iPlayer on the N900?

Whenever I try to go to the BBC iPlayer website, I now get the 'your mobile phone is not supported' page.

I have tweekFlash as well set to Flash 10.1 but that doesn't seem to make a difference.

It seems that the BBC is now blocking iplayer access to N900 users. If that is the case then its a real shame - I was using iplayer quite a bit.

Has anybody else experienced this?

[matthew_maude]

i haven't tried it myself but they won't be blocking the N900... the tweak flash plugin only reports that you have flash 10.1 so some sites will still work fine but others will actually need flash 10.1 to run and i'm guessing thats whats happened

look on youtube to see if they have a channel on there like 4oD do

[peterm54]

same here had no problem using iplayer until recently says the same.

[aspergerguy · Accepted solution]

@mikkiet

@peterm54

Whilst you can't download, you can still stream with "bigscreen" version on MicroB:

[mikkiet]

Thanks for the above reply. Didn't know that you could access big screen version using N900 or indeed a PC. I thought that this was only for TV's and game consoles.

However, it does make me wonder why we can't no longer access the regular iplayer web site.

Cheers

[peterm54]

for some reason my desktop short which always took me to big screen now was taking me mobile version,deleted shortcut and created new one ,now works.

[demolition]

The BBC have introduced something quite bad - browser detection using the browser's "User Agent String" (comperter-readable name) . It's bad because some browsers, like microB, can display the content well enough but are actively discriminated against, where as some will slip through and can't display the content so well.

Fear not! There is a way for those who wish to browse iplayer with the pc-layout to do so. I recommend "Hide User Agent", which is available from the maemo.org repositories (extras-devel I think). It's very stable but it's not quite as easy to use as tweak-flash-version, so to use it you need to have ready the User Agent String of the browser you want the detector to think you're using. Copy and paste the following into a text file and use as required...

Default: 

Firefox/3.5 Maemo Browser 1.7.4.8 RX-51 N900

Firefox Mobile (Fennec): v4

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux armv7l; rv:2.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0.1 Fennec/2.0.1

- the Fennec bits can be removd to spoof as a desktop (I usually do)

- the software "Hide User Agent" has a text-box where you provide the UA string you want browser detectors to "think" you've got. Paste in the one you want to use from your text file.

- Fennec, is fine for most things. Trim the "Fennec 2.0.1" if a website think's you're a mobile user and you want the desktop site. For store.ovi you need to use the proper Maemo version.

... do a search for "User Agent String" and it will come up with a few. I would suggest sticking to either of the above at at least something Firefox based to keep speed up and display errors down.

[knuthf]

Install the "Macuco" browser - from the repositories. This emulates the iPhone on most sites, and demonstrates the privilege with N900/Maemo. Things are available. The Charlie Brown solution is posible: "No problem is so big or complicated that you cannot walk around it!"

[mikkiet]

Excellent! Using 'Hide User Agent' works a treat. Now have full access to BBC iPlayer again.

[mikkiet]

It seems that the BBC has done it again!

Looks like they have upgraded their website to support only later versions of flash.

When I try to play a program, the area where the program resides in the browser window is just blank.

The big screen version still works but playback is very jerky even when the processor speed is ramped up to 1GHz.