Be Excellent To Each Other

Chinny explained this all once, but I forgot.
I obtained an old sky box for my sister for to get TV in the out-of-the-way place that she lives. Now it works but needs a card to go in it.
Sky don't appear to be selling the freesat cards any more.

Help.

Yellow card they were called. Ebay should help

Edit: might be old news.

Strangely, it doesn't.

edit: Dr G, Apparently you can only buy the whole system now, not just the card. I read it on a forum.

Oh. Ring them and check. All old Sky subscriber cards become Freesat cards when the contract is cancelled, I believe.

I think that is right.. as we were looking into free sat..

Annoyingly, my dad threw his sky box away when his subscription run out and bought a brand new freesat box. I was peeved with him when he told me.

Will do, ta. Does anyone have an old subscriber card they aren't needing, incidentally?

I can tell you for sure shortly. I cancelled Sky on Tuesday - we've got a Humax Freesat HD box which is better than the Sky HD box in respect of the EPG and skimming around recorded programmes. The Sky HD box is in the boy's room now so once the Sky sub runs out will be interesting to see if he gets all the Freesat channels including HD.

Am I correct in thinking they mung your PVR functionality when your sub runs out?

Ooh, what does it do?

Yarp.

Yeah, we got the Humax Fox PVR a month or so ago and it's quite cool. Pricey up front but on the other hand you aren't having to pay Murdoch every month. The fact that Sky+ functionality is barred when you end your sub is disgusting. Makes them no better than drug dealers IMO. The box does the work, and you own the box!

So far..

If you select a program it automatically asks if you want to record the series and if it's available in HD prompts you as well.

Records with pinpoint accuracy the programs you stick in the planner - no 2 minute buffer zone before and after the programme - like magic it knows when it starts and ends.

Much better fast forward and rewind compared to Sky. Also when you pause there's no lag in the audio catching up like there used to be on Sky so no missed dialogue and further rewinding.

Also non-EPG related;

Less prone to going squirrely as fuck like my old HD box used to. Needed cold resets at least once a week that did.

Quieter than Sky HD box.

Changing between HD resolutions on the fly

Takes a while to boot up though - a good 20-30 seconds.

So far I am really happy with it.

Hmmmm I was thinking of getting Sky HD.

It's £49 for the box and the sub is the same as what I'm already paying.

Trousers, is the HD box louder than the Sky+ box?

[quote="Trousers"]

On SD the RGB out is certainly better than our old Freeview box. Better colours, brighter picture. No way to try HD.

The boot up time is a pain in the ass though. And it sometimes won't let you delete stuff until you perform some special yet secret ritual.

It's not particularly loud fan-wise but occasionally you can hear the disc thrashing like crazy which can be distracting.

No, it's +£10 for the HD pack. Without which you don't get any HD.

The new Sky software is much better at this, when you hit record you get a "record once/record series" prompt.

You can do this on the Sky box, set the output resolution to "auto" (same as channel). I've never found any content in anything other than 1080i though, and it has a habit of giving you an ugly SD planner if you pull the guide up whilst watching an SD channel.

Trousers, aren't you missing out on FX HD, SciFi HD, and SkyOne HD though? That's where I get most of my HD content from.

Yeah... n.c.o. They also charge existing customers and extra £30 to plug the fucker in. Nice.

Although, I was thinking of sticking with Sky to make use of the free broadband once my Talktalk contract is up.

Not sure what to do now.

I nearly cancelled Sky and went FreeSat a month or so ago, but in the end just cancelled the sports and they gave me a discount for the next 6 months. I'm really impressed with Sky Talk and Broadband, so was loathe to get rid.

Yeah fair point - although the new planner is bastard slow I find.



It's handy for switching sports to 720p but then I only get the Champions League in HD now and that means listening to David Pleat. Bugger.



I am indeed but through the magic of the internet I can watch those shows anyway on the PS3 and forking out all that money which ultimately ends up in Rupert Murdoch's pocket has never sat that well with me.

It depends on the box I think. Mine's OK, but I'm convinced Toby's one is a bit quicker.

When we set the box to "auto" i.e. pass through the satellite stream, we found all the sport was in 1080i.

Fair enough. I'm just too lazy to torrent/transcode(ish)/NAS/UPnP/PS3 them all. Admittedly that is quite lazy.

TVersity on a PC really is a godsend for that.

I really must get round to plugging in my knacked-screen laptop and NAS at some point, rather than just using my main laptop.

Does it do container rejigs when feeding MKV to the PS3, or does it do a full transcode? It used to be the latter, which is less than ideal. I prefer not to leave my power-hungry PC on, anyway; my NAS can do the streaming job.

Is there a good Freeview dongle for Mac? I've seen plenty for PCs but the Apple compatable ones are twice as much. They do look twice as not-flimsy though.

It's bloody twitchy with MKVs, so much so that I've sacked it off. It was only an experiment anyway as I was considering running the Xbox solo as an extender and moving the media centre upstairs. It's not gonna happen.

No idea, I've never had an mkv. I suppose you could have a thing where the PC comes on once a day, does jiggery pokery from one folder to another on the NAS, then turns off again.

That sounds completely awesome, actually - except I've still not found anything else remotely as good at streaming to 360 and PS3. I'll give 1.08 a whack when that comes out. That and my old laptop is a Core Duo laptop, so pretty good at power-saving when idle, especially if I turn the wireless off.

Ah, right. Anyone can stream SD. That's not an interesting problem

That's more or less what I do, except I do it manually. The NAS does the torrent thing and the unrar operation so I get the MKV file. I then have to revert to the PC to run a special tool (either mkv2vob or GotSent) which consume the MKV and spit out, in just a few minutes, a file that claims to be an MPG (but actually contains the same data the MKV did). For whatever reason, the PS3 plays those, including surround sound, with no loss of quality compared to the MKV.

I set the tool up to put the result file back on the NAS, then manually add it to my UPnP server's file list (I could set that up to poll, but it results in a lot of extra hard drive spinups).

Does HD stuff only come in mkvs, then? To be honest, I almost never get a rar either, with the bits I go for. It can be told not to transcode, or transcode only when necessary. No idea about container formats though.

Technically no -- the mp4 container would be far more preferable because it has better device support -- but MKV seems to be the only container the Internet pirates use. AVI can't contain H.264, I think, which is a much better codec for HD content than DivX.

Sure, but the container hacking is very specific to the PS3, so I don't know if it would have been added. I found some forum posts on the subject that said it certainly didn't work, but that was six months ago.

So, card obtained, box connected, signal received..
Card inserted, phoned number to activate..

Sorry, your box software is too old and the box itself is too old to update.

FFS. This is now in the realm of being a bit of a pain in the arse.
Help me beexyone knobody.

Is there an indoor market type place near you Kal? Small business types? In my experience, the small, techy stalls tend to sell satellite gear (sometimes... under the counter, hint, hint) or have some knowledge that may help.

Unfortunately not. It's not helped by all the bits being at my sister's house rather than in front of me, so I can't mess about and google up solutions.
Looks like we'll just need to buy another box anyway.