Changes to BBC Recordings

[Midnight_Voice]

@jparnell82 

You got me thinking there, but I don’t think this is technical debt.

Technical debt is when you leave a known kludge in the code, usually when you are desperate to get it out of the door, but you know that while the kludge is the lesser of two evils, it’s going to come back and bite you in the bippy if you don’t do something about it in the future.

And if you kludge the kludge to get over some issue, instead of fixing it properly, then this is the interest you are paying on the technical debt.

So what would the kludge be here? Not the original design of recording, as I don’t think anyone could have reasonably anticipated what the BBC are now asking for, 12 years down the line.

So is the kludge that a pointless recording is being made, rather than just having a marker? Yes, it’s a bit of a kludge, but it’s also a remarkably elegant solution to all the potential problems that arise from trying to amend existing and proven code that has run for years. And has got, in the jargon, ‘a bit brittle’.

But the kludge aspect of it isn’t, I think, going to bite anyone in the bippy, so I don’t see a technical debt there.

I can see you imagining vast swathes of megabytes gobbled up unnecessarily as you record BBC programmes. But actually, might you not change your behaviour, reason that all you need do is make a mental note of what you wanted to watch, and not make the pointless recording at all?

Maybe we need the ability to set Watchlist reminders for past and current programmes, as well as for future ones, which are these ‘mental notes’ given tangible form? And in the case of future ones, to differentiate whether we are looking for an alert when it’s shown, or just the mental note?

And as I would defy anyone to keep track of which episode of Homes Under The Hammer gets shown when, to have a Series link of mental notes as well.

Maybe this got discussed when this change was being planned, and was dismissed as too complicated? Nobody asked me what I thought 😢

But when all is said and done, what we are going to get is a handful of unnecessarily large ‘markers’. And we all have plenty of disc space free, don’t we? 😛

[Hooba]

If 5.1 audio was available on BBC iPlayer I wouldn't be at all bothered. But it isn't available, so I am pretty miffed.

There's vanishingly little reason to have the record feature on the BT/EE Tv boxes - which at one time was the platform's unique selling point. Even the value of being able to record the Now Sports channels is diminished since Now (if going direct) offer the ability to start a live broadcast a full 2 hours after the start.

So yeah, I guess switching from a Pro Box to the EE AppleTV solution might start to look like a more attractive option - have they introduced 5.1 audio on that yet? Because if not it's an absolute deal breaker. 

[Popeye13_Official]

No. 5.1 audio isn't supported on iPlayer and the difference for those recording vs watching the iPlayer version, will be a significant drop in audio quality. 128Kb/s 2.0 AAC audio is as shambolic as it sounds. You get 192Kb/s on UHD shows and live-streams, but its still 2.0

Their excuses for the lack of it as as bad as the reasons for no subtitles and even FHD on Apple TV boxes. Another backward step