UK Digibox: Classic or Dud

I have erased Community TV and Teachers TV and Bloomberg. Perhaps I am becoming reckless. I am tempted to erase the pop video channels too.

I think the VCR will forget the time if you switch it off at the plug.

i unplug it, it uses battery power while asleep.

Back in the days when I had an attention span.

ITV3 has been superceded in our affections by More4 and ITV4 (all yr ITC/RAI needs).

They're talking about debut hat-tricks on Sky Sports News. I bet they don't mention Tony Cottee OR if they mention Ian St John they neglect to point out that Everton beat Liverpool 4-3 in that match.

Hang on, I have email, they have email...

I have taken to watching National Geographic's rubbish list programmes (Top 10 "when bears fall out of trees onto trampolines", that sort of thing - seriously, the other night I watched a bear fall out of a tree onto a trampoline. It bounced off the trampoline and fell head first onto the ground. Then they followed it with some people who nearly drowned trying to rescue a cow off a cliff. Do you even get National Geographic on Digibox?

I still haven't watched anything on ITV4. Too many channels!

An old-fashioned valve amplifier would definitely last longer if it was kept switched on all the time - valves are really just a sophisticated sort of lightbulb, and valve failure nearly always occurs at switch-on.

Middling? Vehicle?

It's a terrific picture!

I'm now watching a Snow show on one of the normal channels about land ownership. Pam is getting quite angry.

(I shamefully have left my CD player, phono pre-amp, line-level pre-amp, and monoblocs switched on for weeks at a time. The CD player has a class A output stage so it's probably sucking power from the wall like nobody's business 24 hours a day. It's the only concession to audiophile lore I make thesedays. I accept I'm also killing the planet).

Seeing as we are picking on your writing, you also made 'thesedays' into one word. Is that a new usage, like Morrissey's 'Everyday' meaning ... 'every day'?

I suppose I can meet you halfway on Quick Change.

The MOD owns 600,000 acres of land in the UK - cor! The mods own only a few promenades.

Another parallel is 'Inbetween Days', where I am not sure the first word is quite a proper word.

It is only now that I understand what you meant by 'Snow show'.

The rockers, I suppose, own only a red guitar, three chords and the truth?

See http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/terrestrial/mux/

If you can't get BBC3 (Mux1), you probably can't get BBC1, BBC2 or News 24 either?

I call serial commas, "the Oxford Comma". Sounds much posher.

This morning: red button goals galore action from the likes of EVERTON.

In the near future:

Friday 20 January - 1900-2030 GMT, BBC THREE
Group A: Egypt v Libya

Saturday 21 January - 1900-2110 GMT, BBC THREE
Group A: Morocco v Ivory Coast
Group B: Cameroon v Angola
Group B: Togo v DR Congo

Sunday 22 January - 1900-2100 GMT, BBC THREE
Group C: Tunisia v Zambia
Group C: South Africa v Guinea

Monday 23 January - 1900-2100 GMT, BBC THREE
Group D: Nigeria v Ghana
Group D: Zimbabwe v Senegal

Tuesday 24 January - 1900-2100 GMT, BBC THREE
Group A: Libya v Ivory Coast
Group A: Egypt v Morocco

Wednesday 25 January - 1900-2100 GMT, BBC THREE
Group B: Angola v DR Congo
Group B: Cameroon v Togo

Thursday 26 January - 1900-2100 GMT, BBC THREE
Group C: Zambia v Guinea
Group C: Tunisia v South Africa

Friday 27 January - 1900-2100 GMT, BBC THREE
Group D: Ghana v Senegal
Group D: Nigeria v Zimbabwe

Saturday 28 January - 1900-2100 GMT, BBC THREE
Group A: Egypt v Ivory Coast
Group A: Libya v Morocco

Sunday 29 January - 1900-2100 GMT, BBC THREE
Group B: Angola v Togo
Group B: Cameroon v DR Congo

Monday 30 January - 1900-2100 GMT, BBC THREE
Group C: Tunisia v Guinea
Group C: Zambia v South Africa

Tuesday 31 January - 1900-2100 GMT, BBC THREE
Group D: Nigeria v Senegal
Group D: Ghana v Zimbabwe

R.W. Burchfield - The New Fowler's Modern English Usage.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/4614598.stm

"The guy who owns it really should do the lottery because the chances of sending out a signal from a digibox and sending out precisely and exactly on a major emergency channel are far more than 14 million to one."

Today:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/devon/4712122.stm

SO JUST WHAT ARE THE ODDS?

It's ironic that this thread has turned into a bit of an S.O.S. list.

More digibox excitement: the other day I put it on top of the DVD player, and when I tried to play a DVD it wouldn't work, just kept saying "CLOSE" and flickering about. Took DVD back to library as "damaged". Got replacement DVD. Also refused to work. Tried DVD that is personal property and known to work. Would not work. Moved digibox. All was sweetness and light again.
That was a bit longwinded. To sum up:

a) I am a joey.

b) My digibox lacks some kind of "shielding".

c) funny old world.

I want one of those Humax recording things.

I wonder if ITV Digital boxes are collectors' items?

3-way at Argos sounds absolutely delightful. Brings a whole new meaninglessness to "please go to your collection point".

-- PJ Miller (pjmiller6...), January 4th, 2007.

Directly after last night's opening episode of gritty kidnap drama FIVE DAYS, a disembodied voice suggested that I "set [my] recorder" to make sure I managed to catch "all the episodes".

Did anyone else hear this, or was it a subliminal message?

It's just my impression, because I don't actually know, but isn't the US pretty far behind when it comes to digital broadcasting in general? Clinton signed a bill that said all transmissions had to be digital by a certain year (I think it was 2007) but Americans have never even heard of digital radio, much less TV.

The other thing that occurs to me is that maybe that's a good thing! Digital television seems like the final nail in the coffin of "the public airwaves", i.e. the idea that no-one can own the magnetic fields of Earth, and no-one can own all the air one must vibrate in order to broadcast radio and television signals. Because governments are "auctioning" the spectrum off. Am I misled in the thought that this is a very different concept from what has heretofore prevailed, i.e. that broadcasters used the frequency spectrum at the public's pleasure?

a) your aerial is crap or badly aligned
b) it is in the shadow of something
c) Signal strength is poor till analogue switchoff occurs (although this is not much of a problem in London, compare to the other two).

Government are auctioning licences rather than selling off spectrum, but it does amount to the same thing. Multiplexing is what is centralising the airwaves. Bouquets of channels need to be broadcast from the same place rather than in a distributed fashion so there are gate keepers other than the government and TV-Channels in the mix.

I also worry that because digital broadcasting has been taken up in a climate where the spectrum has been auctioned, rather than... what, borrowed? - then there will bo no obligation whatsoever to provide public service programming, i.e. educational programming, programing for kids, etc. And government requirements, both in the US and the UK, for broadcasters to permanently switch off their analogue transmitters forever, seem like a government enforcement of this privatization (not to mention an enforcement to buy expensive new kit).

indeed the bbc was explicitly made into a govt propaganda outlet during the general strike, and then during ww2.

there was a huge row re. coal mines being under private property. iirc the landowners got paid.

the biggest constitutional upheaval since 1688 (1910-14) ended in a weird kind of stalemate (in which the authority of parliament had to be maintained *against* the public (women, unions).

Does reception affect things like bitrate? I didn't know it worked like that - I thought you either got the picture quality as broadcast or you got break-up. I thought what Tracer was complaining about was things like 1980s drama serials on ITV2 looking like they've been converted on someone's laptop in ten minutes by some freeware.

I get more drop-outs on less premium AKA shit channels. Is that for the same reason, or am I doolally?

Have had no drop-outs so far, except when I thought the sound was out on Big Brother, having not realized that's just the way the show is.

That is artefacting and has to do with the channel purchasing a paltry amount of bitrate.

Which channel was it?

ha, i spent last night doing exactly that. (although was bbc2 comedy from 1995)(and it was taking about 14 minutes per half hour)

> Bitrate is different. The less premium channels run at lower bitrates and are prone to artefacting.

this is what i thought tracer meant upthread - artefacting / pixelation.

oddly the worst picture i've seen is on csi on five via analogue - facial shadows were a lot darker than they should've been - like they'd been digitised on a 16 colour amiga or something. without dithering.

sounds like a dodgy scart connection to me.

TV was better at 405 lines. There must be a sloganed T-shirt I can get to that effect.

(Give me a break - 3 hours of sleep a night for the last six nights!)