Got a response from the BBC the other day:
Quote:Thank you for contacting the BBC iPlayer Support Team.
We understand that you find that programmes are downloading more slowly since installing BBC iPlayer Downloads.
There isn't any rate limiting in place. The BBC platform is currently uncontained and in theory if you have a 1Gbps low latency link you should realise downloads speeds of this rate.
Max theoretical on a 1Gbps link is 120MB/s, 100 is more realistic. The BBC platform has 2*80Gbps of connectivity with 50-60Gbps regularly used. Actual download speeds/rate are a factor of many things:
Bandwidth
Latency
Protocol overhead (layer 2-7)
Application overhead
The download speed displayed is calculated using the time taken to complete download from first byte to last byte of a 2MB chunk, so may not represent total available bandwidth.
Once again, thanks for taking the time to contact us.
A lot of that is gibberish to me, and I decided to give up and deal with the downloads speeds of 3-4MB per second. However, today I received another e-mail from the support team (I hadn't responded anymore, so was surprised to receive it):
Quote:Thank you for contacting the BBC iPlayer support team.
I understand that you're experiencing issues with slow BBC iPlayer downloads.
I can confirm that there is no cap in place to limit the download bandwidth at our end.
Can you confirm if you've recently updated to version 1.4.1 of BBC iPlayer Downloads and changed the default download location? We're investigating a small number of reports of slow downloads when downloading content to external storage using the latest version.
Having a copy of the log file , which is a file on your computer that will have logged all recent process with your installation of BBC iPlayer Downloads application is helpful.
Windows users can navigate to the log selecting the following form the start menu:
Computer/C: drive/users/AppData/Roaming/BBCiPlayerDownloads/Local Store/app.log
Please include the log file in the additional information box at the end of the iPlayer help contact-us form.
Once again thank you for contacting us.
I'm definitely not saving to an external device, but will look at sending them my log file. I was on the older version and have now reverted back to 1.4.1, because they both seem to download at the same speed. However, not sure why they're sending Windows guidelines to me, because I said on the form that I'm on a Mac. I'll have to find out how to get the log, but if anyone knows, please do let me know.
Will keep you guys updated on how I get on.