So is it just me being a little slow, please don’t answer that, but now long as the BBC’s iPlayer been offering some of it’s show in HD to either watch online or download?

So at 1.3GB per hour watching shows in HD via the BBC iPlayer is really going to eat in to some peoples bandwidth caps, but downloading or streaming these shows, as long as you have at least a 2MB broadband connection, isn’t the main issue preventing some people, ie me, from watching these shows. It’s the processing power of the graphics card.

Now I have a 10Mb connection with an old’ish PC powered by a 2.66GHz Intel Celeron processor, 768Mb of Ram and a seperate NVIDIA GeForce4 MX 4000 128MB graphic card, and although the HD version of the shows downloads fine, and they sound great, I’m only getting 1, that’s ONE, frame every 3, THREE, seconds. Now don’t get me wrong, that those ONE frames lookings amazing for something that is being streamed over the internet, but I would really like to see the other 74 odd frames inbetween. (Have a look at the frames at the bottom of this post, I’m not sure if they do the HD service justice or not, try compairing the ‘Previously’ text and the Ladies Hair, click on them to see a large slideshow version.)

Looks like my cheap PC may be getting a new 512MB graphics card soon, or I could just stick to watching show via the iPlayer in standard def, but you know what they say…..

once you’ve gone HD you never want to go back. Continue reading »