Freeview Boxes : Classic or Dud?

Rejected Neighbour spin-offs:

Bouncer's Nightmare
Bertha Goes Bananas
The Mangles Christmas Carol

and not forgetting "Hello again, we bludgeon"

> 30 Rock! or maybe it stopped again

last 2 of season 2 are on friday night.

five.tv seems to be of the same opinion as grimly, the listings link keeps giving me:

"The system cannot find the path specified."

anyway, gadget show (increasingly terrible), NCIS (increasingly terrible) and Numb3rs (increasingly terrible) are all on 5. as are L&O:* (although despite being 4 or 5 years behind on L&O:SVU they keep showing only repeats)

five.tv is one of the worst web sites ever made, and it hasn't changed in fucking years. Just try to find information about the baseball games they show. I dare you! They show two games a week. What teams will be playing? Who knows!

apparently HD is coming to freeview on or around nov. 1! hotcha

that's BBC HD, mind you - which i believe currently has about five shows on repeat and a test card

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3166/3098983708_59d3a0f7c9_b.jpg

the "x" on the tic-tac-toe board marks the exact center of the screen, fact fans

Remember to retune your boxes if you want more TJ Hooker and Ironside repeats.

Channel 4 HD coming soon too, apparently. Course, existing freeview receivers (including lots of those built into HD tellies) won't actually be able to decode HD channels, we'll need new boxes for that. (although apparently the USB DVT jobbie I've got for my PC will be able to cope with it)

You need really good reception for the HD channels. If you have problems picking up the regular channels, you'll be out of luck.

Unless this is what the whole retuning thing is meant to solve, who knows?

Doesn't digital reception become less of an issue when analogue gets switched off? Because then they can turn the power up without worrying about disrupting the old system, or something.

Remember to retune your boxes if you want more TJ Hooker and Ironside repeats

What channel shows TJ Hooker repeats?

still not got a humax

xp the new Quest channel.

I was hoping it was 24 hour repeats of old Richard Quest shows.

Is that up and running? It's been on there for ages as "Coming Soon"

Launches tomorrow with the retuning, though it was meant to launch in May.

i was misinformed about BBC HD on freeview.. if you're in london you won't get it til 2011 or something. they figured there would be all kinds of problems rolling it out so they wanted to do london last, so they'd have gotten good at it, but apparently it's been dead easy so far so they could have done london first. oh well. i am told you won't need a new decoder..

18:00 Weird Connections Locust That Watched Star Wars, The Locusts are amazing at avoiding obstacles. Biologist Claire Rind shows a locust Star Wars and observes it neural responses to find out how.

Anybody re-tuned yet? Any difference? (I still can't get C5)

Channel 5 is surely just an urban myth yes?

I have retuned.

That was exciting!

I'm waiting for the phone call from my mum in about about a week asking me what colour buttons to press and in what order.

i am told you won't need a new decoder.

Well you were told wrong if you are refering to the HD channels. They require decoding of a completely different transmission protocol and codec. Almost every Freeview box currently out there will need to be replaced to get these channels.

If anything it now seems worse.

i rescanned only to get five and a n other channel replaced with 'five has moved, please rescan' messages. swizz.

I'm waiting for the phone call from my mum in about about a week asking me what colour buttons to press and in what order.

I was at my parents' house on monday and ended up writing them a list of instructions on how to retune. And also telling them to buy a new bloody telly.

Chewshabadoo that's sort of what i suspected :(

You can watch (fairly low-bitrate at the moment) HD on iPlayer already though.

lost ITV4 (Champions, The Saint, Space 1999, etc.), gained Quest (TJ Hooker) - bleurhg...

i updated bedroom tv which is attached to an indoor aerial and that picked up five no problems, big tv with the proper aerial still doesn't want to know.

Had Channel 5 anyway but have now lost ITV3 and 4. Not too happy with the usual shambles. An apology would have been nice but of course this is broken Britain and their attitiude is they simply do not care.

Ah, broken Britain.

I did notice that some channels are 'hiding', e.g. ITV2+1 is still giving "We have moved", but on ch33, "ITV" it says, is actually ITV2+1

Koogs, it depends if your proper aerial is pointing in the right direction, I'd guess.

^^^this is exactly the problem I have. It's driving me mad. I can get C5 sometimes on the big TV using the analogue service but now the freeview tv doesn't even acknowledge the existence of it. I had to pay 79p to watch Flashforward via "replay" on my bt vision box. It's madness I tell you.

oops , that's an xp to koogs.

Sometimes you have to re-retune.

I've done that. This whole thing makes me feel old.

You think? I still miss the Rediffusion channel!

i have re-re-retuned even since the bedroom tv has worked.

i don't have much say in where the aerial is pointing what with this being a flat and the aerial being 2 floors above me. but the signal strength is 100% (5? miles from xtal pal). during retune of bedroom tv five popped up very early along with the bbc channels. on the main tv it just says 'unknown 123812' or something. probably a function of the digibox.

(never did like that digibox. have to press button to switch between tv and radio which means no radio recordings on the tivo anymore. it also puts up nasty 'looking for updates' at 3am every morning spoiling every foreign film that film 4 has ever shown)

(You can turn that off usually, check the 'config' menu)

you'd think, but i've looked repeatedly and seen others with the same problem.

How old is the box, Koogs. Even the cheapo one you get in supermarkets nowadays are a shitload better in terms of reception etc than even mega-expensive boxes from three or four years ago.

is about a year old, a phillips DTR220. ironically i plumped for it after two of the cheaper models wouldn't work with the tivo (it changes channels in order to record freeview channels by simulating a remote control's IR codes but the database of models it can emulate was fixed 6 years ago and doesn't understand the newer, more exotic makes)

i could just buy a humax and solve two problems at once...

My sister has one of those, it's pretty nifty and the EPG and interface look like an old 8 bit computer.

Anyway, I use a Topfield PVR 5800. Why? It's a pretty solid bit of kit out of the box. But you can easily upgrade the harddive with a standard PC 3.5inch drive if you want, copy videos onto your PC, and best of all they encourage people to write their own 3rd party software for it. For example I use this EPG: http://www.toppy.org.uk/~mystuff/

The community is pretty large for this stuff: http://www.toppy.org.uk/

i did a manual rescan, which lets you pick a single frequency to scan. and it picked up five right off. so i clicked on 'save new channels' and it didn't save it, because, i guess, it wasn't a *new* channel. i did the same again and noticed there were more options than just 'save new channels' like 'replace all channels' and that worked (but because i'd only searched one frequency i only got those channels, like 6 in total, five, gay rabbit, all the faves). a full scan and a 'replace all channels' and i'm sorted.

got bitten by the 3am update again last night though. 1:25 into Bergman's Dreams on film4, 5 minutes of zx81 quality graphics...

Humax DVR here now crashing if left on the BBC channels for too long. Which is a pisser if you go on holiday and forget you left it on BBC 1 and get home to find it has recorded stuff for two days and then frozen. Bah.

So I can get ITV1, C4, C5, E1, etc in the evening but not in the daytime. What's that about then?

WTF

you should see the size of satellite some dude is putting up on the tenement next to mine; thing's like fkn hubble

can you just put up any old satellite you want if you live in a tenement? thing is p.horrid