Freeview Boxes : Classic or Dud?

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

Is it 7+ feet across? If it is, it may be an old-style C or C/Ku band dish.

it's the fucking ladbrokes round the corner! liberties

it's not quite 7feet no but it's about 4 feet across; it's pretty big

So Freeview Channel 66, only recently added, is something called movies4men, which is generally shite but throws up the occasional gem (no doubt entirely inadvertently). In the past week or so we've had "Out of the Past", "Django" (the original), "A Bullet for the General" (hadn't seen this before) and, on Saturday morning at 9am, Bunuel's "The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe"!

so?

i've seen movies4men on my brother's skybox before, i must admit i would probs watch these movies... when our freebox is reconnected I shall def check that out.

Well that contribution was worth waiting for, thanks, well done there fella (xp)

oh i do apologise my man i intended only to indicate and investigate the v interesting relative implications of your introductory so

No no the apology is mine for being a curmudgeonly twat always assuming the worst in people... it's too early in the day for me tbh.

dudes i'm moving into a place w no aerial but with a sky dish. should i go freesat??

fwiw I use one of those little indoor aerials and it works a treat even though my place has concrete walls. I think it cost about a tenner in sainsburys.

ahhh. will try.

indoor aerial FTW

:D

i have a channel 8, sat there between BBC3 and BBC4. never saw it before last night. some local london channel. lots of pearly kings and queens and people complaining about pains in the gulliver.

need a new PVR. current one (a digistream) suddenly keeps insisting on recording two copies of the same program, at the same time, tying up both tuners. it also claims to be recording when it isn't, "Recording (empty)" it says. playback has gaps in it too.

humax hdr2000t? it says 2013 on some of the listings. things have moved on since 2013.

the newer humaxs (humii?) have smart tv like features, "freeview play", which i don't really need - the fvp series. reviews of these on amazon are mediocre, citing hmi issues.

i guess i'll have a wander to richer sounds, see what they have.

so, i walked to chiswick richer sounds* and bought a "Mocha" Humax FVP 1000 or something. got it home plugged it in and it was like My First PVR, episode guide had space for 5 channels a page and 2 hours across, finding anything would take forever.

but i updated the software and it drastically improved, UI-wise. am generally happy with it. recordings list is a mess though (like windows Icons view, always sorted by most recent first) and no user-defined folders like the DigitalStream. programme info also harder to get to.

the interesting thing is that LOADS of people are having the exact same problems i was, the forum, which i only looked at today, has pages of them. apparently sony PVRs are rebadged DS boxes and they are also suffering. DigitalUK, the governing body, seems to have changed something that's caused all the recent woe - https://www.facebook.com/UKterrestrialTV/posts/1303918016299713 and oddly the incoming signal is breaking playback of old recordings.

so it wasn't the box, and i could've saved myself 180 quid.

* richer sounds is posh nowadays, catalogue is printed on proper paper, not that cheap shiny stuff. also has a lot less in it, as do the shops. a few big tvs, more high end stuff. and many fewer people than when i went there a few years ago.

(i say it's posh but it's still at the arse-end of chiswick, past all the closed down shops, empty blockbusters etc)

Channel 81, Talking Pictures, home of creaky old British movies that no-one was or is interested in, does play the occasional blinder - tonight, they have "The Passenger" followed by "Gumshoe".

Tuned over at random last night, it was Otis Redding doing "Satisfaction"

More like it.