UK Digibox: Classic or Dud

he loves it for the digital radio.

Good channels on Freeview:

BBC4
BBC3 (for nightly Liquid News, anyway)
BBC News 24 and Sky News
2 run of the mill wall to wall pop video channels
ITV2 for 24 hour I'm A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here coverage and other things when that finishes
The History Channel (never actually watch this)
All the normal national radio channels in interference-free hifi sound.
BBC6 music radio for repeats of old sessions and concerts.

The other crap:
Some gameshow repeats channel, a Travel channel, and Shopping.

Also handy for speedy digital teletext and quick to view info on what's on now and next.

i have real grown up (sky) digital so get all these and several squillion others, but obv this is more expensive...

From the website:

What is Ftn?
The Ftn Channel is a frank and uncompromising television experience with an eclectic mix of gritty reality, celebrity gossip, full on talk, hard hitting drama and real life fly on the wall documentaries. Pushing the boundaries of entertainment, Ftn features some of the most original and exciting programmes from LivingTV, Bravo,Trouble and Challenge? and broadcasts from 6pm to 6am.

I have not noticed it being frank and uncompromising, but it certainly pushes the boundaries of entertainment.

and yes, buy it, it's good.

They'll be broadcasting E4, Bloomberg, Discovery, UK Gold and a few others on four 24-hour DTTV streams which were previously thought reserved for Freeview stuff. £20 for a decoder card (£10 if you buy online), £8 a month thereafter, no annual contract. Here's the rub - you need a set-top box which accepts a decoder card, i.e. an old OnDigital or ITV Digital contraption. All the people (me included) who've bought the new-style boxes since Freeview was launched in late 2002 are out of luck. Oh, or you can buy an even newer box, which *will* accept a TUTV card, which will be in the shops in the next few months.

In the short term, this means (presumably) lower bitrates for existing Freeview channels on the two multiplexes TUTV have bought space on (channel five for instance - no more near-DVD-quality CSI) and no chance of any more free-to-air channels on those streams. In the long term, who knows?

I may have had three

It's basically "Old Ladies? Let us Leech off you.. Look Jewellry... mmmmmmm ... !"

"Aaaah !! I'm on the TELLY!! I'm a Salesman!!!! on TELLY !!! HEEllllPPPPP!!!!"

QVC never seems to sell anything but women's things these days.

Connected it all up to find that it can't receive any of

BBC1
BBC2
BBC3
ITV1
ITV2
4
BBC News 24
ITC News
Sky News
Sky Sports News
CBBC
UKTV History
Sky Travel
Price-Drop TV (wtf?)

Now I have to see if I can return it. I have a feeling they will try & stick the blame on me for not checking coverage fully first ...

So you can get BBC4? That's odd.

I'd blame N. for encouraging you against Web advice. Good luck getting a refund, DM.

Sky uses a standard that it created all by itself and uses a bit rate of 4 Mbps Variable nominal.

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!)

xpost - pixellisationing up is so hard to do.

ebay. they stopped making new ones about two years after they started (which is a pity because it's a great bit of kit). other (inferior) boxes that do the same thing (after a fashion) are available... the humax seems popular.

(the one thing that does bug me with the tivo is the american use of channel numbers. bbc is 21 for instance. which is fine and you get used to it quite quickly because the names are there next to the numbers. but then the digital channels come along and are also numbered in the same range as the terrestrial channels so instead of bbc1, itv1, bbc2 etc being adjacent they are now interleaved with filum4 and fiveUS and the like. fiddly.)

and they're finally giving her an Oscar after decades of neglect.

just shoved a hoooge disk in it because 40 hours wasn't enough. it's open enough so that you can do that. i think later models and all the imposters are locked down tightly so you have to go the official upgrade route. or don't bother.

all the major manufacturers do them now, the sony thing won awards in christmas "What Hifi (And Surround Sound System And Half A Dozen Other Categories)" thing. can get them with dvd burners and hard disks and stuff but they tend to be expensive (tivo was £400 when i bought, £200 a year later, £99 for one weekend in some obscure chain about a year after that that was getting rid of theirs)(that said, first nicam video recorder i bought was £399 so...).

i wouldn't've thought volume would affect bitrate. besides, audio bitrate and video bitrate tend to be independant. the compression trick is the reason mute buttons were invented. if they try and grab my attention that way they get muted out. see also: flashing banner ads and adblock

Audio compression: when audio signal peaks are brought below a certain level to prevent clipping in the audio signal when it is digitised or otherwise transmitted. This is usually accompanied by some gain normalisation to make sure that the sound power level is brought back up to what it was before compression. Heavy compression and normalisation is what makes the adverts sound louder

Compressing the audio: Using a codec, (AC3 and MP2 are the most common for TV) to reduce the bitrate of the audio signal.

Video Legalising, brinigin the video signal to within the parameters of the tranmission system, i.e. making sure that the Luminance, Chrominance and Variage of the signal all fall within specified limits, in a modern all digital workflow this is normally done at the editing stage.

Video Compression: Using a codec (MPEG-2) to reduce the bitrate of the video signal.

Artefacting: blockyness, blotchiness brought on by over compression of the video signal or inexpertly applied compression. In general older poorer video sources compress poorly and show more digital artefacts because they don't have the sharp focus and bright tones footage of modern digital material and because of existing analogue artefacts You can also get artefact with high motion video at low bitrates.

Blocking or Pixilation: If the MPEG-2 transport stream is interrupted then data integrity will break down. The picture is encode by block of pixels, if it can maintain the picture by holding a block for a few frames then the system will try to do this in an effort to keep something on screen whilst this system tries to recapture the stream. this causes squares on the screen to appear to freeze, go black or change to unexpected colours.

"Don't forget to set your *digital* recorder so that you catch every episode."

I half expect them to say "don't forget to set your Humax PVR 500..." tonight.

Sometimes the picture goes away but the subtitles stay. What's all that about?

part 2 (universally judged inferior i think) is on film4 on saturday:

http://www.channel4.com/film/reviews/film.jsp?id=132014

in related news (kinda), ftn is showing Takeshi's Castle starting in a week or two. first time on freeview.

Yeah, cos it's supposed to be one better, innit? That's the point.

15:35 Relocation, Relocation
16:40 Relocation, Relocation
17:45 Relocation, Relocation
18:50 Snowmail
18:55 Relocation, Relocation
20:00 Relocation, Relocation
21:00 Inside Waco
23:05 GBH
00:40 Relocation, Relocation