ITV allow UK users to watch most of their TV programmes online using ITV Player. Now I’m not a huge fan of the ITV Player at all, the amount of times I’ve gone crazy over the player not working is more than several times a week and you only have too look around the ITV forums to see the amount of complaints. However, ITV does have some good shows but the ITV Player is let down with servers that can’t seem to cope with demand, a website that runs Microsoft Silverlight and larger focus on the adverts working than the programs!

Anyone running dual screens, i.e. two or more monitors, will probably have noticed that you can’t click the full screen button built into the player and activate another window without it loosing the fullscreen and going back to the default size. Well there is a solution!

ITV's on-demand service, ITV Player

Due to the multiple problems with the ITV Player, Chris Orr created a plugin for Firefox called Caught Up. What the plugin does is allows you to pull the video stream into Windows Media Player rather than viewing the program through the ITV Player website. When viewing the video in this all you need to do is right click the video, click Zoom, then click Fullscreen. The quality isn’t great but this way you can carry on playing a game, writing a blog post or anything really on the other monitor and maintain the ITV Program in Full Screen. The plugin doesn’t just work with Windows Media Player but other Video Players also.

Download Caught Up Firefox Plugin From HERE

Further information on how to use the Plugin is HERE

If you need any help feel free to contact me, for specific plugin issues contact Chris via his website.

By: Mark