Freeview Boxes : Classic or Dud?

No, but then it's just worth it for Radio 6, ocasionally.

Digital Radios is a better thread.

Dud for ropey BBC/ITV bitrates, the shopping channels (only funny the first time), the wasteland of ITV2 and the creeping menace of Top Up TV (I don't have an old OnDigital box so I can't see these extra subscription services - which are eating into channel-space, goddammit*), the plethora of EMAP-owned trash radio.

(* - OK, more to it than that, but, y'know...)

Jury's out: BBCi (I'm waiting for June...) and TMF/Hits channels (one could get sick of even "Hey Ya"), BBC3 (comedy on weeks before BBC2 - which I still can't help thinking of as a taster for its real analogue broadcast... the endless looping repeats on BBC3 don't encourage any kind of timeslot loyalty and by the time of BBC2 screening I can't remember what I have/haven't seen; the rest of its programming is without merit).

Not matter how many times I retune, I can get E4+1 perfectly but I've completely lost the reception for E4, Channel 4 and ITV etc.

ftn seems to have been replaced with virgin1 which is showing Deep Space 9 5 times a week (opposite Daily Show unfortunately).

Tivo is currently listing 50+ episodes of takeshi's castle, all of which i've seen before. i deleted the Season Pass thing only to have them all reappear due to Takeshi Kitano wishlist thing. will have to delete them all individually...

bbc radio channels seemed to rejig last week sometime - needed a channel rescan to pick them all up again. annoying - missed start of dirk gently.

I heard a couple of Radio 4 trailers saying that you'd need to rescan around October 2nd, the other week.

(note to self: remember to listen to Dirk Gently whilst in the car tonight)

Our box spazzes out and demands a rescan once every week or two. It happened again yesterday and afterwards we were missing bbc 1 and 2.

I seem to be rescanning every other week, what with C4+1 and Virgin 1 and the BBC radio stations moving about. It's quite a to-do and I worry about how the old folk cope.

Also, ITV2 never seems to provide any programme guide information anymore. Luckily, I couldn't care less.

One of our Freeview boxes started demanding a rescan every time it started up, for a couple of months, before dying completely.

What I don't understand is why you can't search for a show title on these things. The schedules are just stored as text in some database sitting right there inside the box - why not let me search for "Kath and Kim", show me the results, and then let me select "Record All"?

We recently got a new freeview box which can has about 100+ channels on it, can record programmes, and can pause TV shows (even live ones) for up to 30 minutes. It's amazing! and it only cost £50.

The schedules are just stored as text in some database sitting right there inside the box - why not let me search for "Kath and Kim", show me the results, and then let me select "Record All"

er ... you can pretty much do that with ours (some kind of two-year-old humax thing that actually rocks a lot harder than i think i realise, given that it does all the stuff CJ's new thing does and i just take it for granted). you can certainly search for programmes by name, and it's piss easy to set up a repeat-recording schedule.

Yes well that... makes sense

Everyone should have a Humax.

i want the one that can output to my computer.

I need to read the instruction book with my Sky+ box to see if it can do fancy searching stuff. It can record whole series and that, but if I don't actually see it in the TV guide, it doesn't go "yo, you're going to miss that thing you might have wanted to see". Or maybe it does and i just don't know how to work it.

Anyway, that's not freeview. Our freeview box doesn't work due to crappy aerial set-up in the house. Luckily a guy about five doors down from us has a van with "TV Aerial Repair" written on it, I just have to befriend him for some spurious reason.

I am scared to make mine rescan, since I currently appear to be getting Setanta Sports without paying Top Up.

It seems like you've got a non-spurious one already!

xpost

"hello, I've just moved in a couple of doors along from you, care to fix my aerial for nothing in a neighbourly kind of way?"

"hello, I've just moved in a couple of doors along from you. nice van. be a shame if something happened to it, eh? now, about my aerial."

Here's a "controversial" article about Freeview .. I can't say I really buy the guy's argument. I may not even grasp it in the first place.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/10/10/telebusillis_digital_tv_analysis

Our Freeview box recently broke (it won't turn on - yes, I've tried replacing the remote control batteries) and would like to know where CJ got a box that records for only £50.

yes, me too. i have seen cheap freeview boxes, less cheap recording boxes but freeview boxes that also record have, in my experience*, all been around the £200 mark. need a second digibox for the bedroom and may as well get one that records.

(* argos)

ok, they are coming down in price - a sony here for £80

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Sony-SVR-S500-Digital-Recorder-Freeview/dp/B000FCQMFK

It's no Humax.

(that sony's a refurb, oops)

and humax ain't no tivo. 8)

We bought a fairly bog-standard freeview box (to replace an unreliable one which kept freezing up) from Argos about six months ago. We pay monthly for that top-up TV thing, so presumably our details exist on some top-up-tv-database somewhere .... because a couple of weeks ago we had a phone call from whoever the manufacturer of our freeview box was, offering us an upgrade to this spiffing new recordable one for just £50. My husband, being a sucker for gadgetry, said yes immediately and it arrived by parcel courier the next day. I can't remember what make it is, but I can check when I get home tonight if anyone's interested.

oh, the topup tv thing, that makes sense. they've switched to uploading content to recordable devices during the times when other channels don't broadcast and the content is then available for topuptv people the day after, like tv on demand. as far as i understand it anyway.

http://www.radioandtelly.co.uk/topuptv.html

Top-up TV is rub-a-dub, as far as I can make out.

bought a new set-top box to watch at christmas whilst parents monopolised downstairs tv. only the bedroom tv didn't have a scart-in.

tried it on parents' bedroom tv which does have scart-in. no dice - loop aerial, even one that's amplified, doesn't get a good enough signal for digital tv. i fear this will be the same for millions of sets come 2012.

anyway, got it home and tried to use it to replace the old itv digital box that keeps freezing up (sticks on bbc channels, which meant i lost about 5 hours of recordings over christmas, 5 hours of bbc7 rather than virgin1) but the tivo cannot replicate the remote control commands that it needs in order to turn over to the correct channel.

it will, i think, let me watch one channel whilst tivo is recording another, so not entirely useless. i will need to rejig wiring though as i know have more scart inputs than i have scart-in sockets.

argos are doing a wharfedale 160G pvr thing for £75 in their sale btw

http://www.argos.co.uk/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/Search?catalogId=1500000701&searchTerms=WDTR160

have no idea what it's like other than the shape and the price. 8)

I think I need to get myself one of those, but the thought of disconnecting everything and trying to work that into my existing set-up gives me nightmares.

i believe it should come first in the chain, then output to your DVD/VCR/whatever, which then outputs to your TV - i think?

My OnDigital box finally died last week, so I replaced it with the only cheap crap that Tesco had. It's bollocks. Audio keeps going out of sync, and you can only pull up now/next info for the channel you're watching!

Staggeringly, neither can the Humax PVR that is tied for "best" in all the reviews. But the Topfield TF5800PV can, as it just as good, and also has firefox-esque extensions you can download to it. So that's the one for me.

I can press "guide" on the Humax and it tells me all the channels (providing it has been on for a few minutes).

We now have a cheap crap Tesco telly that is digtal-enabled, but it is total shit, can't get a decent picture for most of the channels, whereas the Humax can get a good picture through the same (not very good) aerial setup.

Mind you, all I do is record crap and never watch it.

PS: What did you end up doing, Deano? Giving up and Watching To The Manor Born?

(Portal / Half Life 2 / babylon 5 avis on laptop)

um, Teletext Extra. meant to be a 14 day episode guide but what you end up with is (virgin broadband) adverts top and bottom and room for 5 channels worth of listings in the middle = so much paging up and down.

new set top box is sharing a scart lead and a plug socket with the dvd. bit of a faff but should be ok as i should never be using both at the same time. but unplugging set top box means having to sit through 5 minutes of setup every time i turn it on. oh um. it's 'interactive' red button indicator is also eye-searingly bright compared to the last one.

So, until last weekend I had all the 'normal' channels (bbc1,bbc2,itv1,c4,5) working tickety boo through the freeview box, suddenly itv1,4 and 5 give me "no signal' or "service unavailable" and when I re-tune they've gone altogether. What gives?

Reload your channels when it's quiet and the reception is good (i.e. not during a thunderstorm)

Somebody told me that I should "empty" the box first by unplugging it from the aerial so you that when you retune you get nothing and then turning it off for 15 seconds and then plugging it all back in to re-tune again. Do you think he was having a laugh?

I mean - how would that help?

Sergio Corbucci western, "The Mercenary", on London Live at 10pm tonight. I'm wondering what I missed on Tuesday now.

London Live ued to show a ton of lesser ealing movies as matinees, which was very handy, and dodgy london gangster movies in the evening, which was less so

they are also good for things like sapphire and steel and space 1999

and (german) music documentaries on the slits or the clash or tangerine dream

but being regional none of this ever makes the listing magazines so you have to rely on the epg.

They basically had an unannounced Jean Rollin season too a few years ago. Which was, er, interesting.

Sounds like London Live are licensing stuff from some of the boutique movie labels - 'Revolver' was issued by Eureka not that long ago, and Indicator are currently doing a series of 'deluxe' Rollin discs.

"The Mercenary" was great. It had one of the funniest and most ridiculous fight scenes I've ever seen. Also a Mexican stand-off between a gay Jack Palance and a guy dressed as a clown.

A few more spag westerns on London Live this week:

The Grand Duel (1972) - tonight, Tuesday, Friday (with Lee Van Cleef, don't know this one but it looks good)
My Name Is Nobody (1973) - Monday, Wednesday (but on too late to watch for me both times, dammit!) (Leone was involved in this and supposedly directed some of it, top notch Morricone score)
Navajo Joe (1966) - Thursday (with Burt Reynolds, great Morricone score)
Arizona Cult (1966) - Saturday (never heard of this one)

Navajo Joe is by Corbucci of course.

My Name Is Nobody is rubbish, sadly. Leone getting outflanked by Peckinpah artistically and the Hill/Spencer comedy westerns on the box office, and basically using the film to say that he is not mad, please do not put in the paper that he's mad. There's a Henry Fonda monologue about handing the legacy of the West off to Hill that is so literal and embarrassing. Great soundtrack tho yeah, and nb I also hate Fistful Of Dynamite so ymmv.

Yes, I love Fistful of Dynamite.

I wish I did! Desperate attempts to repeat the Blondie/Tuco friendship magic, many Big Emotional Moments that fail to connect, the horrible smug politics...Morricone delivers on that one too but that's about the best I can say about it.

> My Name Is Nobody

watching this now. i've heard the main theme somewhere else, something about small child, something idylic... bugging me

It 100% sounds like a vintage kid's tv theme, would not be surprised to learn it has been used as such.

pvr locked up last week and i had to pull the power, which it didn't like and showed its dislike by resurrecting 'recordings' which were empty when you tried to play them.

today i stopped an export when it was 90% done and i find i have nothing from before the time i pulled the power. it's saying 12 recordings BUT only 10 hours of free space, so the old files (over 400 of them!) are taking up space still, just not showing up as playable.

there's a chance i can get them back if i can work out how to network the player to the recorder (i've done it before, years ago), but i think anything i can copy that way will be encrypted still.

everything, including the empty programmes, came back overnight, it's a birthday miracle.

but does make me think i really need to get everything off it and reformat the disk

Regarding My Name is Nobody, until this very moment I had always assumed that Terence Hill was one of those American actors who moved to Italy in the 1960s to star in Italian films, like John Phillip Law or Steve Reeves. But no! He actually was Italian. His real name was Mario Girotti.

Despite being Italian he was apparently dubbed even in the Italian-language versions of his films, because that's how the Italian film industry rolled in those days. There were two attempts to make him a star outside Italy, both in 1977, produced by Dino de Laurentiis (Mr Billion) and Lew Grade (March or Die), which were inevitably huge flops.

But there are worse things than being a huge star in Italy.

Not just Italy, most of Europe! There's a Terence Hill/Bud Spencer museum in Berlin (Spencer also Italian, real name Carlo Pedersoli).

And yes all Italian movies were dubbed back then.

There was a good section on this in a documentary I saw (might have been a Luigi Cozzi one?) where they suggest the industry was still largely (exclusively?) using wartime Arriflex cameras that were so noisy there was no point in using the audio channels at all. There was also an awful lot of guerilla filmmaking that was shot with no permissions at all - such as Highway Racer/Poliziotto sprint crashing down the Spanish Steps - and so the fewer people/equipment that had to run away the better.

I love that dubbed effect tbh

Yeah - and not having to record any audio opened up a lot of compositional choices that just weren’t there for filmmakers who needed to use eg boom mics

A lot of classic Portuguese cinema, even into the 80's, has astonishingly bad sound. It wasn't easy to get right, Italy's all dubs approach makes sense.

Plus of course it allowed for so many co productions!

i somehow missed the start of the new series of Portrait Artist Of The Year last night which was, somehow, on both Sky Mix (freeview 11) and Sky Arts (freeview 36) AT THE SAME TIME.

lickily, it's repeated, multiple times (tonight, saturday, sunday, monday...)

"Day of Anger" (dir. Tonino Valerii; starring Lee Van Cleef & Giuliano Gemma) on London Live tonight and at various times during the week.

Also on London Live:

"Darling" followed by "The Servant" tomorrow night.

"Barbarosa", a 1982 western starring Willie Nelson on Sunday.

Monte Hellman's "China 9 Liberty 37" next Friday.

"Assault On Precinct 13", on Legend Xtra at 23:10 tonight.

On TPTV at 11:30 am Thursday the 31st, Faces In The Dark. A Boileau-Narcejac adaptation with a great eerie Mikis Theodorakis theremin score. What if gaslighting but husband? Direction a bit flat at times but if you like those early 60's Hammer crime thrillers this will work well for you. Def deserves to be better known.

11.30am? That's not exactly ideal!

how good is their catchup service?

Oh it'll no doubt be on again some time.

don't freeview boxes all have DVR functions?

Mine's doesn't!

I think Koogs is the expert here!

I suspect most ppl don't have a standalone Freeview box any more, the DVB-T receiver is integral in just about TV sold in the UK in the last 10-15 years. And I don't think most TVs offer a integrated recording feature?
We used to have a cheapo 14" bedroom TV that you could put a USB stick in for EPG-programmed recordings. That was about 2008. Not sure why this isn't a feature on all tellies. Legal issues?

A quick Google suggests it's pretty common for TVs to offer recording over USB, by no means standard though... and I'm guessing it's blocked for the streaming services? And encrypted for playback on the device only? With our old telly, you could play those files back anywhere. (My 2014 Samsung doesn't offer this).

i bought a pvr specifically (a humax) and that does freeview and freeview play (ie catchup over internet) and obviously records. so it's not a freeview box with a recorder, it's a recorder with freeview if that makes sense. it has 4 tuners, which is great. but last night i needed 5...

the dvb signal is very recordable. the captured streams even have AD and EPG data in them.

my 2011(?) tv is pretty basic but has hdmi, usb (no record) and a scart socket and av ports for retro consoles. i don't think new tvs have those last two 8(

you've got Freely tvs as well now, which i've just done some work to help support (adding audio description). those are iptv devices but which also follow broadcast so you'll see a channel list like a normal tv but it's all done over internet, not via an aerial, live streaming for live programmes, iplayer app etc for catchup, netflix app etc for subscription channels

i do wonder, though, whether the name is confusing. and had they not heard the IP Freely book-author joke?

(i fear having to buy a new tv tbh)

sky arts, Freeview ch 36, are doing their paint-along thing again. 6-7 every day next week, from Monday

they used to do this over lockdown, 2 hours on a Sunday afternoon, model in one half the screen, one of their paoty contestants in the other doing a portrait, was very zen tv.

Curiously, That's TV (UK) - home of "You Rang M' Lord" and "Birds of a Feather" et al - is showing "Abigail's Party" right now, it started at 8.10 am!

just the way to start your weekend, guess they have Festen on afterwards, then mother! at lunchtime.

On the contrary, it's being followed by 5 hours of "You Rang, M' Lord" and 6 hours of "Birds of a Feather".

much the same effect then

it was in the listing as 'Play for Today'

but it seems to be a one-off as it's '80's Music' and more 'You Rang' next saturday, which is a pity because the Play for Today list has some good things in it

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Play_for_Today

Yes, I've never noticed that channel showing anything other than old sitcoms... and 80s music.

They showed all of Monty Python last year.

Box of Delights on bbc4 tonight.

was thinking recently there's a world of those kids' things that they could show the way they currently show UFO and Space 1999 and the Prisoner endlessly. things like Children of the Stones, Changes, Lizzy Dripping, that thing with the Ugly Wuglies...

(in fact Talking Pictures already has a kids slot on Saturdays. tends to be things from Mike Reid's era though, about 10 years before mine)

Talking Pictures have been doing Ghost Story for Christmas repeats this week btw I just didn't get round to noting this

i did see Oh Whistle but it wasn't the good one

I might watch some on the catch up, happy enough to enjoy even the bad ones in the right mood

Started watching a Lee Van Cleef spaghetti western from 1968 on London Live called "Beyond the Law" ("Al di là della legge") when 30 minutes in it switched over to Italian - which wouldn't be so bad if it had subtitles but it doesn't... oh hold on, it's back to English... and now it's back to Lionel Stander talking Italian... and back to English.

... actually an Italian/West German co-production. At least they haven't started speaking German yet.