chris nixon : nixonbyname.com

One of my most popular posts on NixonByName is this one in which I’m pretty disparaging about BBC’s iPlayer. The system was clunky, it slowed down my PC a great deal, and the overall experience was poor.

It didn’t take long for me to give up on it all together.

The iPlayer is now fully available to UK users, and with a huge promotion push from the TV channels, is gaining popularity.

I now use a Mac, so I am forced to use the flash version of the player…and I’m really enjoying it. I wouldn’t use it to watch all my BBC shows, but as a catch-up tool it’s excellent. If they could get the UI for browsing available shows to be a little better, I would say it’s perfect for when you’ve missed that vital show.

It’s pretty simple. You search for a show, click it, and it starts playing. That’s the way watching TV online is supposed to be. Even if the downloadable version of iPlayer was available for the Mac, I’m not sure I’d bother…my Media Center does the job of normal TV viewing, this is just for when something is forgotten.

My favorite feature is when you have missed the end of a show, something that can happen with MCE. iPlayer doesn’t require you to load the whole show to watch the end part. You can just skip forward near to the end, and it will just load from there. Brilliant.

I am looking for Mac/PC folder sharing advice. I have a shared folder of .avi files on my Media Center that I want to add to from my Mac. When I try to copy the files across, OSX tell me I don’t have write access.

Sure enough, when I look at the folder on the PC it is marked as “read only”. I unclick it and hit apply, and all looks fine. However when I look again, it has marked itself as “read only” again, and I still don’t have permissions in OSX.

I have tried accessing through OSX using my windows log-in rather than as a guest, but this appears to make no difference.

Can anybody help?

Update from Pownce: