Well, I’ve been keeping my eye on the BBC iPlayer project for a few months now. They’ve been the subject of quite a bit of criticism recently based on the fact that their client runs on Windows XP only, no Mac, no Linux, no Vista. However, this week I came across a thread that implies it runs under Vista without too many problems.
So, I thought I’d give it a try. I headed down to the website. The first problem was the website detecting that I wasn’t running IE, or XP, which it was picking up from the UserAgent string (the identification attributes that browsers sent to web server to let them know what capabilities they have). The screen shot at the side shows the reported issues with downloading the application.
Luckily, this is quite easy to spoof, so I was quickly on my way downloading the package. I was all set to change the compatibility mode of the executables used by the application, but guess what .. it worked first time! (see screenshot)
I’ll keep you posted if I have any problems!
This is great BBC Iplayer in Vista. My install failed but it still worked fine
Thanks!