When common TV channels are boring you...

During this Christmas time, contents in every TV channel in Spain are almost the same: films which has been on again and again, pop musical programs and mixtures of Youtube videos.
Because of this, I looked for other programs which could “entertain” me a little more, so I ended up on the BBC UK webpage, where I found tones and tones of good quality programs. It seems that the money that BBC gets from TV Licenses is well managed!

Thanks to the BBC webpage it is possible to watch their TV channels (BBC One, BBC Two, …) in live streaming but only if you are in the UK (due to legal facts). However, it’s possible to watch the programs which has been already on TV through the “BBC iPlayer”, a Flash application to play sources of video streaming (also available to run it with Adobe AIR).

My boringness seemed to be finished! But when I was trying to watch a programme... I realized that my Internet connection was not enough to watch it smoothly (iPlayer don’t allow you to change the cache size easily). I continue searching for a while and I found a multi-platform program to record and watch BBC programs which offers lots of options (subtitles, programmes guide, using of proxy [you know what for], etc...). It’s name is get_iplayer (http://www.infradead.org/get_iplayer/html/get_iplayer.html)  and it is an open-source project. It's aim is to provide a way to watch BBC programmes in devices which don't support Adobe Flash. It was abandoned by its author, but some other people has continued developing it.


So what I do now is start downloading the programme I want to watch, after a few seconds I start playing that file with VLC and I enjoy it :). When exams are gone, I’ll try to make a simple GUI to make it easier to use!

One programme I’d really like to recommend is “Come Fly With Me”, a new comedy series which takes place in an airport. You can read more about it and watch some chapters here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00trc9v
It’s on BBC One every Saturday at 21.00 (UK).

If I could pay for an UK TV License to watch these channels on my standard TV I would do it with pleasure.