Digispy

I’m looking at getting one of these digital tv cards/usb decoders for my pc though there is one obvious problem in my head: i live in uni halls without any sort of central antenna system. to make matters worse, i live in the basement (though i have direct line of sight to “outside world”).

http://www.pedersen.eclipse.co.uk/pictures/south.gif

my halls are in south kensington just off of fulham road and the digital tv checker says i can get it – is the signal strong enough there (i assume from crystal palace transmitter) such that i can use a £15 indoor arial?? an outdoor arial really is out of the question (we cant have anything from our rooms visible on the outside of the building).

plus, what is the issue with TV Licences – i assume since i am receiving BBC i must, in addition to the £100 tv card purchase a £100 licence as well? when i order it it will be delivered to my parents address – whom already have a TV licence – and if i take the card to london i won’t be on any “list” that the tv licence people may have. I’m not trying to evade a licence, I just want to know where i stand.

thanks for any thoughts!
nick

I hope this doesn’t preclude us from restating the fact that the ITV Digital management team were the most incompetent, arrogant, useless, out of touch bunch of tossers to inhabit TV land since the just as useless BSB crew, some of whom were involved in both fiascos.

And that’s saying something, I can tell you.

They threw away the UK DTT service in the most reckless way imaginable.

What if the same tossers were in charge of the change over to 625 lines, colour, widescreen, FM radio, DAB radio etc etc?

They would all have failed because of them and the obscene greed of second rate football bosses.

All ITV Digital boxes which might be returned, should be soaked in a bucket of water for 24 hours before posting…

It’s the least we can all do to get some small revenge on their utter and corporate greed, and give the ‘liquidators’ nothing.

They’ll get their fat fees up front anyway…

Well would this be possible…
I live on the border of Warwickshire and Leicestershire and get my signal from Waltham, and i’m missing the SDN and 3&4ltd. I tried my neighbours aerial and got everything except Mux D. Would it be possible to feed both off these signals into the box in order to get all channels (I know I can merge the cables with splitters but technically..). Would this cause problems? Obvously the box will duplicate a load of channels and put them into the 100s, which isn’t a problem but would this work?

I’m thinking of buying a second DTT box and came across this site on line which seems to offer a fair selection (when they get stock in!). Has anyone else used this company? Are they reliable?
http://www.digitalboxshop.co.uk/products/index.php

Picture and sound keeps breaking up and can’t view teletext properly on analogue.
Box keeps turning off and on too…?

I’m sure I’m not going to be the only one getting a new DTT box fairly soon and like a lot of people, I don’t know which box to get.

How about people who have the various DTT boxes list the various specifications and do timing experiments so that a good comparison of the boxes can be created.

To be as comprehensive as possible, this probably should be done in a number of stages.

First stage
Identify the different boxes and the various specifications and capabilities possible (eg scart, rf out, spdif out, mheg, epg).

Work out what timings to test, (eg time to change to an from combinations of mux’s {different and identical QAM’s}, time taken to poweron, time taken to load mheg pages).

Second stage
Get a number (more than 1) of people who own the particular box to list the specifications, and do the timings. Take screenshots if possible of the user interface. List reliability, how easy to crash, how easy to recover from a crash.

Third stage
Group all this information into pages for each box to make the comparison easy.

Do people think this is a good/bad idea?

Same question to the DS moderators and would you be willing to host the results of this?

Interesting article on this on the DTG website:

http://www.dtg.org.uk/latest/latest_fv_press.htm

Also – at the end of the article is a link to a presentation made by Dermot Nolan (a UK media analyst)

http://www.dtg.org.uk/news/uknews/_w…lweconvert.pdf

He also comments on DAB, US DTT, and the success of DTT in Berlin.

Alan

The premium channel, NASN – The North American Sports Network which launches in the next few days on Sky has an interesting website http://www.nasn.com/subscribe.asp which gives the three options of subscription: Sky, Cable or Freeview…

…obviously it would be a bit daft designing your website if you had no intentions of carriage on DTT….

Could this channel be negotiating to appear on SDN perhaps? It’s an expensive channel, £12.99 a month to subscribe but shows the kind of stuff which is unavailable elsewhere and may have a core niche of viewers who would be willing to pay this much for one channel?

Hi
I have just recently aquired a Phillips DTX637. I’m having severe problems with with picture breakups,somtiems there is no picture at all. I did manage once this morning to get it to work almost flawlessly, however after removing the ariel plug and re inserting it , it returned to picture breakups. I have tried the box with an older outdoor ariel and a newer loft ariel, there were slight differences althought not much. I live about 9 miles from the bleanplwyf transmitter in west wales. Can anyone suggest anything?

I know this has been brough up many times before, but i thought my situation was a little odd seeing as i have line of sight from my ariel?

thanx

Huw

I have asked locally and DTT from Divis is reaching into my area in the Republic of Ireland.
Could someone tell me what is the best spec/quality/reliable etc DTT receiver on the market at the moment.

Thanks.