Everybody who imported an iPad from the US to the UK certainly noticed that the BBC has decided to not yet support the iPad on the iPlayer, which is rather disappointing. We can assume (or hope) that this will change quickly once the iPad is officially released in the UK, but that will only be on May 28th.
Well, luckily there is a workaround available now to make it work in the meantime. Chris at CMGResearch has created the necessary sample code, which creates an iPad app basically launching a UIWebView window with a modified User-Agent header, pretending it is an iPhone.
In addition he added code to change the embed tag with a proper HTML5 video tag.
You will need the iPhone SDK and know how to build applications (i.e. build it as an Ad Hoc app) for your iPad, since clearly, this app won’t be available in the App store any day soon.
Well, I have done it, and can only confirm that it works perfectly fine! Loving it!
Update: WIth the launch of the official launch of the iPad in the UK at the end of May, the BBC has enabled an iPad version of the iPlayer, and as such this workaround is no longer required.
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