BBC iPlayer "...temporarily unavailable. Please try again later"
The iPlayer is great. Like the PVR, it changes the way you watch television. And so I was excited when the desktop version of the software became available. I was somewhat disappointed to discover it was an AIR app (I've been burned by bad Adobe installers and problems with Flash on non-Windows platforms in the past) but, for the functionality it offered, I was prepared to overlook these problems.
Unfortunately, after a while, it broke. Clicking on a downloaded title gave the unhelpful message: "(programme name) is temporarily unavailable. Please try again later."
OK, so I know the drill about not scaring end users with incomprehensible messages, but please, give us something to go on.
The solution, as it often is, was a simple delete and reinstall. What I didn't realise, however, was that merely deleting the application itself and the downloaded movies folder wasn't sufficient. There are some other directories you have to remove too, which are detailed in this BBC article on removal of the software.
To save you clicking through, the directories that you have to remove in addition to the application are:
- /Users/[your user name]/Library/Preferences/BBCiPlayerDesktop.61DB7A798358575D6A969CCD73DDBBD723A6DA9D.1/
- /Users/[your user name]/Library/Application Support/Adobe/AIR/ELS/BBCiPlayerDesktop.61DB7A798358575D6A969CCD73DDBBD723A6DA9D.1/
Perhaps I'm still a Mac newbie, but when I delete an application by dragging it to the trash, I expect all traces of it to go (aside from saved data files in my Documents folder). I've no idea whether this is an iPlayer thing or an Adobe AIR thing, but I would not be at all surprised to discover the latter.
I've disabled comments for now due to spam problems - I'll turn them back on when I've fixed it!
