I’ve just finished putting the car back together, and I’m pleased to report a full recovery. Gear changes are once again quiet; the faint ‘clonk’ has now departed.

I’m disappointed I didn’t take more photos. When things start going wrong it’s easy to forget to document stuff. The removed part looked like this:

The new part can be seen in the corner of this photo:

This goes between the gearbox output shaft and the prop shaft, and provides a valuable bit of shock absorption. Here’s a good example of how a worn item breaks down – picture stolen from Andy Eccles’ excellent post on the matter.

The issue I had was that one of those bolts pictured above had become seized in the end of the propshaft. In the photograph below you can see the extent Alex and I had to go to in order to get it out. The 6 mm hole in the middle was drilled by me on Sunday. The next circular cross section is the bolt itself. The outer ring is a sleeve from the old donut. This piece was removed from the end of the prop shaft. Quite something!

When it came to test driving this evening, I had almost forgotten about the new brakes. I’ve bedded those in nicely – I’d forgotten what it feels like to have straight brake discs! So we’re pretty much there now, with a couple of exceptions. While at BMW today collecting the new bolts I also grabbed a replacement oil separator. When I get a chance I’ll look at fitting this, and straightening the exhaust that just doesn’t look quite right at the moment. This will have to wait though – I’ve got a stag weekend to attend to this weekend, and there’s a rally I want to see the weekend after.

I had the 330d serviced by Vines of Guildford BMW earlier this month. I was pleased with the £99 cost of the oil service, but less pleased with the advisory notices:

• Front N/S tyre worn on outer edge
• Front N/S brake caliper seized
• Prop shaft coupling worn

This weekend I got down to business to sort all this out. £35 had the tracking sorted (after the usual – tedious – discussions about them not being able to guarantee their work unless I bought new tyres). For £274 I had new discs, pads, front N/S caliper and a propshaft donut delivered from C3BMW (after my usual – tedious – stupidity saw me state my old address on the delivery note).

Here’s the haul:

Looking good at this point! I set to work – in the rain.

Old brakes:

Shiny new brakes!

All the brake work went perfectly (as far as I can tell). I even remembered to undo the disc retention screw before removing the caliper, so with a little help from an assistant on the brake pedal it was easy. I had forgotten to order a pad wear sensor, but a quick blast in the M5 (in the rain!) soon saw one gathered from ECP for £10 (over-priced, but worth it for the M5 wet road journey).

So I moved my attention to the worn prop shaft donut.

Six nuts and bolts. Easy. Except of course, that it wasn’t easy at all. Getting access was quite easy – belly panels off, exhaust down etc. But two of the bolts just weren’t interested in coming out of the end of the prop shaft. And, to make matters worse, the prop shaft just wasn’t coming out of the differential, so I couldn’t remove it from the car. Ben Smith was kind enough to pop over and confirm such on both counts.

That marked the end of Saturday. On Sunday morning, bright and fresh, I tried a number of things. I went to Halfords and bought a three legged puller. Fail. I even tried a vice:

Fail. I got angry and took the angle grinder in. The first bolt soon yielded, and I was jubilant:

Sadly, the second bolt was significantly more stubborn. I chopped both ends off, and drilled a 6mm hole through it (12mm bolts). I was planning on eventually drilling the whole thing out, but by this point it was 4pm on Sunday, and frankly, I was utterly exhausted. There was nothing else for it – I had to make an SOS call. I called A Barden.

Bit unfair of me to resurrect that photo really. On both Alex and of course dear reader, you. Alex offered, extremely kindly, to pop over first thing in the morning to sort it out. From Wales. What a darling.

So at 8am this morning, Alex arrived to find the driveway looking like this – proper pikey.

Alex took my advice and tried to shift the bolt in situ. Then, when I’d left him alone and gone to work, he decided to stop messing around, removed the prop shaft from the diff, and twatted (technical term) the bolt out. He has cleaned up the prop shaft, sorted the connection to the diff, fitted the new donut (loosely, with the four remaining bolts) and left things looking, well, just like the photo above.

Hero.

I have now ordered a complete set of 6 nuts and bolts from BMW which I can collect on Wednesday. Then, I shall attempt to rebuild things in the dark. What luck!

So, this arguably important moment in the internet’s history has been and gone. England’s football team, as ever, did the minimum required when it didn’t matter. And lost.

That aside, what was the viewing experience like?

Well, having selected the ‘HD’ stream, I can report that I experienced a reasonably smooth picture, with no buffering issues at all. I wonder how this was for everyone else? I ran some broadband speed checks during the match and found that my normally stable 19mb connection was running at around 6mb. When the match had ended, with the stream still running I had 16mb, and when I disconnected the stream I had 19mb again.

So this suggests that the stream ‘costs’ about 3mb, which is fine, but more importantly it proves that Virgin certainly does suffer from contention issues. Their fibre might be okay, but the switchgear (or something!) clearly isn’t. I’ll come back to this – let me tell you about the picture quality.

Before kick off, we watched the studio in fullscreen:

No one wants to see Sven in particularly high detail, so this was fine. The picture was however obviously low quality as it had been stretched. Switching to normal view yielded a much better picture, but of course it wasn’t really big enough.

When the match began, it soon became clear that at full screen size, it was completely unwatchable. There’s a 34M clip of fullscreen action here: http://v.mukerji.co.uk/2009/10-10-football/fullscreen.avi

On small screen it all came together a lot more nicely: (19MB) http://v.mukerji.co.uk/2009/10-10-football/fullscreen.avi

The trouble is that football needs to be on a big screen! People watch football together – it just wasn’t possible to get any real atmosphere squinting at a tiny portion of the screen.

In fact, the quality was so poor that it often wasn’t possible to tell who was on the ball. The commentators didn’t help here either. Normally as a team pass the ball around you might hear “Cole, to Gerrard, to Lampard” etc, but there was none of that. Why? Because the commentators weren’t there either. Presumably they had the same miserable picture we did.

I had other issues with this experience. Why was the clock/score bar not tucked further into the top left corner? So often it was squarely in the way. This photo neatly sums up both that problem, and England’s general failure:

A minor point, but throughout the match the service informed us that “Team line-ups will be updated on match day” (see the white pane on the right of the screen).

Definitely irritating was that having paid (per view) for a (very low quality) viewing experience, we were subjected to adverts. It seems Perform really can have their cake and eat it.

Overall then, this experience simply wasn’t good enough. Sure, I still believe it’s the future, but things must improve, and fast. The quality of the feed needs to go up considerably. Before that can happen though, UK broadband providers need to fix the contention issues. There were plenty of complaints on Twitter from people who couldn’t watch it properly. My favourite was from @Prezzer:

GOA….. Buffering… 78%… 85%… 97%… LL!!

Perform – You Must Try Harder. If this had been free, I may have passed it for acceptable.

Virgin Media – once higher definition streams are available, I think you might have to try quite a bit harder too.

England’s soccer fan-base is still rocking from the news that the next competitive match, this Saturday, will not be available to view on the television. Due to the collapse of Setanta, the rights for the match against the Ukraine have been snapped up by a firm called Perform, who will be streaming their live coverage to a million viewers on the internet.

The question is, has this really been thought through? I’m a big fan of internet technologies, and I’m absolutely subscribed to the idea that computers will provide to gateway to future TV style entertainment. BBC’s iPlayer concept is fantastic. I’m aware that Channel 4 got there first, but the BBC now have a significantly more advanced product, and their commitment to formats such as the PS3 has got me hooked. I watch much of my TV just like this – PS3 connected to TV:

Catching up on Question Time is however a completely different kettle of fish to watching an England match live. I have visited www.ukrainevengland.com and checked the ‘HD’ stream. I have a number of issues with the concept:

1) Sport is especially good in HD, and is certainly best on a big screen. This ‘HD’ test stream was about 50% of the size of my 720p display. That’s not HD. 1080p is HD. This is significantly worse than standard telly.

2) Internet video streaming is still a bit ropey. The PS3 is hard wired to my good 20mb network, but I don’t trust it with something like a live competitive sport. If newsnight fails to stream, it’s no biggie. If I’ve got a load of mates around to watch the footie and the feed fails, it matters.

3) I’m a long way from being convinced by England’s broadband capacity. I figure that on Virgin Media’s fibre I stand a pretty good chance compared to those on traditional copper fed DSL, but in both cases, how can we be sure that when it comes to the crunch, the transfer capacity will be there? Gloomy autumnal Saturday afternoons are peak internet traffic zones – add the significant weight of 1,000,000 users, many of whom wouldn’t normally load the internet much at all, loading up on video streams, and I think we’ll hit our biggest contention problem to date.

4) This video stream isn’t technically permitted in pubs. Pubs aren’t well known for internet savvy landlords and big internet connections, so even if it were permitted it would present issues. I know that some pubs will acquire potentially dubious foreign satellite feeds, and while this may not be entirely legal, it makes a lot of sense. For all the reasons listed above, a landlord needs to do whatever it takes to keep punters happy.

5) There will certainly be a lack of community spirit about these matches. The very fact that pubs shouldn’t be showing it means that social football viewing will be decimated, but equally, not many homes have the capability to show internet video on a big screen. Are fans supposed to crowd around tiny computer screens to catch the atmosphere? And worse still, if you’ve got a big computer monitor like my 24″ Dell, at 1920×1200 the apparently ‘HD’ stream looks nothing short of revolting.

All this said, I’ll go into this with an open mind. I’m going to get some friends round, and hope that all the technology works. I’ll need to log in to the site on my PS3 with the details I purchased earlier in the week. The provider’s server will need to be able to support 1,000,000 streams. My internet connection will need to hold up for 2 45 minute periods. The quality of the stream will need to be good enough to reveal the sport correctly when upscaled to a 40″ 720p screen.

This isn’t a big ask. I can watch some premier league matches on ESPN HD on real 1080p HD at no extra cost, where the image is pin sharp. I predict a bit of a fail here, but I’ll let you know. I am certain about one thing though: I’m glad this match isn’t crucial, and that this effective trial will be out of the way before the World Cup Finals. I believe this is the future, but we’re simply not technically or socially ready for it yet.