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In the summer of 2007 the Beeb released iPlayer into the wild for those souls (un)lucky enough to be using a Windows OS, this caused quite a stir amongst those people who use a different OS (i.e. Mac or Linux) and so around this time last year auntie gave the rest of us the iPlayer website. Whilst this was a step in the right direction, and a very polished and extremely usable step at that, it always felt as though we (non windows users) were being fobbed off with the web 2.0 equivalent of a hand me down.

All the arguments about the inequities of the website compared to the Windows iPlayer have been made and while I disagree with the basic points of DRM, I do understand that in the current climate of IP potectionism the big media creators had to get their way or the iPlayer wouldn’t exist in any form.

In any case, a couple of days ago the BBC finally caught up with it’s obligations (as declared by the BBC Trust) and released the BBC iPlayer Desktop, an Application that is more or less on a par with the Windows system. Based on Adobe Air, which I believe was taken out of beta on Linux the same day as iPlayer Desktop was released (killer app strategy?) it allows the computer users who don’t buy into that “I’m a PC” trash to download and watch our favourite BBC programmes as freely and legally as our Windows using fiends.

As stated anywhere you read about it, the BBC iPlayer Desktop is still in Beta, and you need to sign up (for free) to BBC iPlayer Labs. But once you’ve done that it’s as simple as downloading and installing the Adobe Air package from Adobes website (no debs rmps or tgz here, just a .bin, and you may need to set is as executable before it will run) then once it’s installed visit the iPlayer website and download the programmes you want.

Unfortunately for me, my computer is a reflection of my real life desktop and as such it’s a bit of a mess. Long story short I managed to have two conflicting versions of Flash installed which meant I had to uninstall both of them, remove Air and start again.

Obviously most people won’t need to do that but there you go.

Once I’d reinstalled Flash and Air it was just as simple as it said on the instructions. Sadly at the time of writing Never Mind the Buzzcocks is not one of the shows you can download, and I think there are a few others that have downloading restricted, but by and large I am bloody impressed with iPlayer Desktop.

My system (Athlon 64 +4600 Dual Core, Nvidia 8500 and masses or hard disk space) handles is without flinching, no stuttering or dropped frame nonsense, no messing about with audio settings in fact visually, it’s very attractive.

The three tabs in iPlayer Desktop are simple enough to work out. Downloads, Now Playing and Settings. Not much room for confusing there.

The one thing I had to do was manually set the amount of hard disk space to use as it was set to zero which meant it refused to download anything, whether that’s a quirk or a bug only the release cycle will show.

If there is one gripe I have about the program though, it’s that you still need to go to the iPlayer website through your browser to download the shows. Given what Air seems to allow, it shouldn’t have been to much trouble to integrate the iPlayer listings INTO the iPlayer Desktop app.

So, for what it’s worth, I humbly score the iPlayer Desktop a solid 9/10 because website integration aside, it really is that good!

On a slightly separate but vaguely related note, the fact that the Beeb have been able to do this and keep the DRM people happy suggests that there will be a time in the not too distant future when things like 4od and Sky Anytime(..Sky on PC..whatever it’s called this week) will choose to go down a similar path. As a proof of concept it’s brilliant!

The only possible spanner in the works is that some one with too much free time and not enough deodorant will find a way to reverse engineer it and hack out the video, which will have the coding monkeys at the BBC dragged kicking and screaming back into the walled garden of Windows and spoil the fun for the rest of us.