Last week, due to the demands of a busy Sky Planner, I wanted to watch a programme on BBC1 at the same time as two other channels were recording. My preference being that I wanted the output on a larger screen rather than an iPad therefore I setup my MacBook upstairs, plugged in the TV and navigated to the BBC iPlayer page, only to encounter the problem that I do not have Flash Player installed.
Since I have only recently started on a clean OSX installation again, I have been trying my very best to avoid installing third party software like Flash. It was looking like I would be left with no choice until I stumbled across the following workaround:
- The first step is to enable the Develop menu in Safari (if you already have this enabled, just proceed to step 3). Start by opening the Safari preferences, finding this in the Safari menu in top left hand corner
- Select the ‘Advanced’ tab and set the ‘Show develop menu in menu bar’ option to active
- Whilst on the BBC iPlayer page (which should still be demanding that Flash Player is installed), open the Develop menu then from the User Agent option, select any of the ‘Safari – iOS…’ options. It will be set to Default as standard however I generally choose the iPad option
- You should now find that the iPlayer is happy to allow you to view the content using the HTML5 framework
This is because the BBC has only released the HTML5 version of iPlayer to tablets at present. By following the above steps, you are simulating your browser as a tablet which is why the functionality is enabled.
Credit goes to the original source Unop for this suggestion.