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Monday 6 September 2010

BBC iPlayer for Panasonic V10

I have been waiting to get the update for my Panasonic V10 television since I bought the TV back in January.  Panasonic have been unusually slow to release it with scant information available and frequent delays.

Thanks to the power of RSS, I came across an update from www.joinfreesat.co.uk which mentioned the update on the homepage.  I followed the instructions and after a switch off/switch on, it was working from the red button service.

It all seems to work well and I'm currently watching the beginning on 'Curse of the Were Rabbit' featuring Wallace and Gromit. Quality is very good and the picture is smooth with decent lip-sync. (I checked the lip-sync on another programme - not very easy with Wallace)!

The update had to be triggered from the VieraCast menu rather than the main Panasonic update menu which I tried without success last night.  Interestingly, I saw that the updated VieraCast software now includes Twitter.  I logged in and saw the usual stuff but I don't think I'll be battling with the remote to do updates.  It is done via the 1-9 keypad 'text message' style but the response time on the Panasonic menus is so slow that updates would be tortuously slow.  It may be useful to scan through updates though.  Most of the VieraCast options really require a keyboard entry - maybe Panasonic will bring out a wireless TV keyboard sometime soon?

Looks like I'll have to permanently wire in the ethernet cable to the TV now.  Well done Panasonic and BBC!

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