Hmmm, I've just seen this article over on El Reg and was intrigued to read that one of their readers had managed to get BBC's new iPlayer software running successfully under Windows Vista despite claims from the organisation that the software is only suitable for use with Windows XP. Having recently upgraded to Windows Vista myself I have to admit to being a little disappointed when I discovered that the iPlayer wasn't going to work on my machine. Tempted by the lures of all of that lovely BBC content and spurred on by reports that it only works under XP, I set about trying to get the service to play ball with Windows Vista. This proved a lot easier than I initially suspected and within 15 minutes I had the service running flawlessly (so far!) on my Vista box. With a satisfying feeling that I'd somehow 'beaten the system' I proceeded to download some behind the scenes footage of the recently aired drama series 'Heroes'. 
Want to know how I did it? You'll need to be registered to use the iPlayer, so if you haven't done so already sign-up here. Once you have your login details then your ready to go. The only thing stopping you from downloading the software is the user agent string in your registry that allows Internet Explorer to advertise what browser and operating system you are using. Fortunately it's easy enough to override this and trick IE into thinking it's running on an XP machine. All you need is a registry hack which I downloaded from here. 
After applying the registry changes I restarted my browser and was then able to login, select something to download and proceed to install the software. Vista did admittedly throw up an error message at the end of the installation but this doesn't seem to have affected the functionality or stability of the software. 
The BBC had this to say according to The Register's article: "We know that some technically expert users are able to run BBC iPlayer Beta on Vista but we do not feel it is appropriate to advise the general user to try to use BBC iPlayer Beta on Vista until we have completed our programme of testing." So the Beeb advise against circumventing their checks to install the iPlayer. Understandable I suppose if it hasn't been fully tested, but isn't that what a Beta launch is meant for? PlusNet are not responsible for any damages caused by following the instructions contained in this blog post. The BBC have made it clear that the software is not currently intended for Windows Vista and any attempt to install it on a machine running Windows Vista is done entirely at the readers own risk. Bob Pullen.
How to install the BBC iPlayer on Windows Vista