F1TV
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I’m curious on getting F1TV. Does anyone use this? Is the service reliable?
Is there an article or any other forum I’ve missed about this?
If so please point me there.I’ve read a number of bad reviews about it. Does it actually work for anyone?
There is a 7 day free trial offer now. As with everything on the F1TV page it’s not clear what it is or how to do it, but turns out you have to select the pay option and give up your card details, then the trial option will reveal itself later.
F1TV works on Windows, has multi-language commentary (English is from Sky) and at least the replays are 1080p max video quality. Haven’t tried live stream yet.
Should also say it’s pretty straight-forward thankfully, there’s no need to install anything (on Windows), and works like any other site with video.
I watched the replays again today, and worked well with no glitches or hickups. The only drawback is that switching between feeds (cars, tracker, data) takes too long, but there’s no problem having several browser instances open at the same time showing different feeds and starting them simultaneously (has to be done manually so there will be a slight delay).
I’ve been using it since the beginning. So far I’ve not had much success watching live, but then I rarely try. Mostly I watch with friends a day or two after.
Typically I load the web page on my iPhone and use AirPlay to an Apple TV, which works outstandingly well, no buffers,hiccups or quality issues. Rewinding using the Apple TV remote is perfect, and seamless.
Now I did have problems trying to watch the free practice replays from Australia this year, which was irritating.
Also,they’ve finally released an iOS app for the iPad and iPhone, but stupidly it does not support AirPlay, and is not very good overall. Viewing via Safari seems to be the best way but there are some problems there as well, such as it never remembers my login so I have to login every time, and since race spoilers are on by default it means that I have to look away while logging in to avoid them (they get turned off with a preference attached to your account). Additionally it does not remember your last viewing point, so if you’re watching an old race and want to come back, you’ll have to advance to where you left off.
All in all I find it worth it for not having to pirate the current races (I cut the cable cord more than a decade ago, and will not go back), but deeply behind any other streaming service out there.
Saw the race live, and everything went smoothly except for a terrible stop and ‘no service’ error situation right before race start, but a refresh page (F5) command sorted it immediately.
There were also a few moments where the video resolution would drop and make it blurry, but too short and few to be of any real annoyance.
It varies between countries. In the US, some of F1 is on ESPN (usually 1 FP, Qualy, and race). With F1 TV you get all the sessions. Session broadcasts are Sky on both, but no commercial interruptions on F1 TV. F1 TV also lets you select fave drivers and the session from their cars, often what we do during FPs. Each weekend you also get an archive of past races from that track, on top of the select archive always available. Haven’t had any trouble with the stream. To me it’s been a great deal.
One thing that annoys is the video controls. There is only play and pause, that’s it. No keyboard shortcuts or nothing, so to go back you have to manually move the slider, but the playline is so thin it’s not easy to grab and once done, half the time the video will then freeze and you need to reload the whole video again.
The F1TV content is fantastic. The F1TV UI on iOS is terrible. There’s no easy way to rewind or fast forward, the drag rew/ff is almost unusable. The rotation of the device to get into the videos is quirky.
If you try to watch the start of a race more than once, you’ll mistakenly exit out of the video screen.
They need to fix this stuff!
This season I’m getting freezes every 4 seconds in every session, in any browser. It means I can’t watch anything live. Watching the replay everything is fine. So disappointing.
And the layout of the page is still the worst mess imaginable. Once I couldn’t find qualifying in between all the F2 and F3 session, so I clicked the F1 link on top of the page in order to just see F1 stuff, but that threw me to the F1 news site where I could see the results, spoiling the whole thing. It’s like the site was designed by a 12-year old.
Those going to F1TV site to catch up with the Baku race now are met with a picture of Verstappen in his Red Bull with a wheel going off the rim.
I mean honestly, how is this even possible? Who are these people? Just spoiling it for absolutely no good reason?
This weekend F1TV is not working and all I get is this error message:
Video error
Sorry, we have encountered an error.
Please try again later
(BM1301)Searching the issue, I discovered RaceControl, (a standalone, open source F1TV client for Windows, written in C# on the .NET 5 platform), which is a program that allows you to use F1TV in any video player (using all the controls), and even download to a file on the disk, and this worked great straight away. Recommended.
https://github.com/robvdpol/RaceControlMaybe I buried the lead in the last post, but if you want to watch F1TV in a normal media player, or even download things as files, use RaceControl https://github.com/robvdpol/RaceControl. Works great.
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