FAT32, Linux ext2 & porkie-pies
What the iplayer can't do is record TV programmes directly to an external drive - not one attached by USB drive or on a PC being accessed over the network. It would be rather wonderful if this were possible but it's not and Evesham makes no such claims for the iplayer.
So, in the first instance, broadcasts must be recorded to the iplayer's internal hard disk. Only after that can you export them.
According to Evesham, drives attached by USB have to be formatted as FAT32.
That restriction is kind of perverse since the use of FAT32-formatted drives means you have to live with an unwanted 4GB limit on the size of file you can export.
Even more strange, Evesham is plain wrong. It is possible to use USB-attached drives formatted as Linux ext2 format, though Evesham has repeatedly denied that to us and to users.
Naturally, we checked to see what would happen if we attached a USB drive formatted as NTFS - the standard most of us use on Windows XP PCs and which has no practical file-size limit - and were miffed but not surprised to discover that the drive is unusable for export or playback over USB.
The NTFS-formatted drive is seen within the iplayer's Diagnostics menu (third shot below) but as the bottom-most shot of the four shows, it's not viewed as being a MediaCentre HD for playback.
Below is what you are supposed to see when you go to the Mediacentre HD option from the first-level menu and if a compatible USB drive is attached or, in this case, such a drive plus two networked PCs running Windows Media Connect.
Do note what's said at the bottom of the screen about the format type of the attached USB hard disk - it's ext2 - yes, the format that Evesham told us and customers that the iplayer doesn't support. Why that ext2-compatibility is important will be very clear, shortly...
