I’ve been listening to BBC radio on the internet — on my PC — ever since the Beeb reduced their Astra footprint to obviously just cover the British Isles. And it’s been working just fine. Until Saturday morning when I tried to listen in on the Graham Norton Show…
… Saturday (July, 16th — was it?) the damn thing started freezing up. Kept freezing up. And it also froze up Firefox to the point of no response. All I could do was to close down the browser with the task manager.
WTF?
Of course, one starts googling. The symptoms I’ve been experiencing seem to have been around for years, for some users, at least, but no one seems to have offered a solution. Well, some were offered, but none of them seem to have done anybody any good. So, is anybody out there who has solved this problem? Or has it gone away all by itself?
My first thought: Theresa May may have pressed the wrong button & nuked any radio connection with non-islanders. But I couldn’t find any hints as to the Beep cutting off bloody foreigners — or British expats. (I’d be happy to bung you a quid a month, by the way.) But I found this interesting tidbit by an expat Brit living in France:
So, no trend two years ago…
But come to think of it, it has happened to me before, but a browser restart always managed to solve the problem für weeks or months to come. Now, I may manage an hour or two of listening pleasure, or, well, as you keep waiting for the freeze, the pleasure part’s been pretty much taken out of the experience.
I’ve been trying other browsers: Internet Explorer, Edge, Opera & Chrome, but they also keep freezing at one point or other. Of course, FLASH is up-to-date, too. And the problem has cropped up on all of my PCs connected to the internet – even on a laptop that all these years certainly hadn’t had any problems with the BBC iPlayer before. This can’t be a coincidence, can it?
Now, with Firefox I get a “Warning: Unresponsive Script” message (or the German equivalent, of course: “Nicht antwortendes Skript”) I also get a hint as to the origin of the problem: “http://static.bbc.co.uk/frame … /sharedmodules/jquery‑1.9.1.js:14”. Opening the debugger actually hints to a problem on line 14. Yea, but what’s that gonna help me?
I don’t know the first thing about Java and I don’t know why the BBC needs the information the damn script is asking for & why it didn’t have any problems retrieving it before — or at least only every other month or so. I’m happy to give it up, guys! I’ve enabled Cookies, by the way, although that never made any difference in the good old days before Saturday, 16th. The problem does seem to originate with the Beeb, though. I’m also getting it at the PC I’m working at. Both use Windows 10. Someone surely must know what this Java request does…
Solutions, anybody?
Now, all googling got me was a bunch of crap:
Lots of people are experiencing probs with the iPlayer: See here. No Solutions. It’s quite interesting, though.
These guys — and I’m sure they mean well — tell me to start Firefox in “safe node”: Start Firefox in <u>[[Safe Mode]]</u> to check if one of the extensions or if hardware acceleration is causing the problem (switch to the DEFAULT theme: Firefox (Tools) > Add-ons > Appearance/Themes). It didn’t do anything, certainly not help. “The Best Answer”. No, it can’t possibly be…
The people on the Microsoft Help pages keep asking some poor schlup with the same problem whether he also experiences these problems with Internet Explorer. Again and again, as the idiot refuses to try the IE. (How can they help you, if you won’t at least try?) Well, I’ve tried it. The problem is the same. After a while, it gives a message to the tune of “BBC website not responding”. Although IE offers the slight advantage of retrying via pressing a button. The page is loaded again and the program starts where you left off. But a) that’s no way to listen to the radio and b) after a couple of times it won’t do anything.
As I said, Chrome isn’t any better. It sure is a fast browser, though, I must admit. But like the IE or Microsoft it wants you to hook up to all manner of crap you — or at least I don’t want/need. Opera also just packs in after a while. Anyway, Firefox being so beautifully customizable as it is, I really like to keep it. And I still get the odd hour in, so it’s not like the damn thing doesn’t work on principle.
Obviously, it’s not the first time Auntie Beep is having problems with her online services, if you care to check here. Although I’m certainly not in a fury. Nor fury and panic like these guys. Jeeze, it just would be nice to see it up and running smoothly again.
I’ve been wasting hours on end on this problem. All it got me are four additional browsers I don’t want and keep using alternately to have the effing radio running.
So I’m asking anybody who finds their way to my blog by googling the problem: Has anybody found a solution? Has the problem vanished all by itself. PLEEEZE!