Hard News: New Sky
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Oh but before any of that, you have to pass the initiation. And believe me, that's no walk in the park
I hope you're not scared of goats...
I can provide goats, the badgers might be harder to find though ....
But the badgers represent the dream of central urban design! (though I'm not sure why that means they have to be stuffed into your trousers)
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Kyle's mobile number is 021-113-0236. Have fun!
brilliant!, I most definitely will (have fun)
ps, you haven't got yulia's number have you,get my txting fingers limbered up......
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This would be the (too late) time to say that I would have preferred my email address to be posted, not my phone number. Ah well.
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OTA PVR, DIY, PC, CD, FV, MPEG4, TV, NZ, DVB-T, EPG, US, QAM, DVB, ATSC.
WTF!!!
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Gee - maybe it's time to roll a cheap OTA PVR - I keep threatening to make a DIY-with-your-old-PC-and-Myth standalone CD - most of the bits are readily available now.
Oooh. Last I checked, myth was still having ish-yews with HDFreeView, but it does appear that they might have been sorted. I'm certainly keen to go down this route. I'd quite like to digitise and then store my CD collection as well.
Mind you the local newspaper here in Dunedin is more confused, last week they ran a 1/4 page article expousing the wonders of a particular digital TV solution for your PC - trouble was it only actually works on US cable systems
It was about half way through reading that article that I realised how deranged it was. Comedy gold.
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WTF!!!
I see your WTF!!!, and raise you OMGWTFBBQ!!11!
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Your PVR is that a Topfield TF6000 or a hacked TiVo. The Topfield TF7700(NZ) modded is likely to be the first off the block for NZ DTT PVR which is a little ironic in that Topfield were not given a chance in the certified boxes and now it looks as if the only certified DTT PVR box is likely to be Topfield.
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OTA PVR, DIY, PC, CD, FV, MPEG4, TV, NZ, DVB-T, EPG, US, QAM, DVB, ATSC
er sorry, welcome to what I do for a living (cable/satellite/broadcast digital TV protocol wrangling - I make a living because all these different acronyms and the protocols they describe exist):
- OTA (off of the air) ie digital broadcast
- PVR (personal video recorder) smart settop like MySky/Moxi/Tivo boxes that will do stuff like record every episode in your favorite shows, let you pause/rewind live TV, skip the ads etc etc
- FV (ok I made this one up - FreeView)
- MPEG4 the compression screen that freeview use for compressing digital video, MPEG2 is the older standard that Sky use, it doesn't compress quite so well
- DVB (digital video broadcast) the scheme used everywhere in the world except the US)
- DVB-T the version of DVB for TV broadcast as opposed to satellite/cable
- QAM/ATSC names of portions of the many standards used in the US rather than DVB
- EPG (electronic program guide) the data packets embedded in the signal that tell you what will be on next weekThe rest I'm sure you know
Come on, I'm feeding you straight lines here - someone was supposed to say "badgers, we don't need no stinkin' ...."
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Thanks Paul, now I've got some more TLA's to confuse people with.
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Your PVR is that a Topfield TF6000 or a hacked TiVo. The Topfield TF7700(NZ) modded is likely to be the first off the block for NZ DTT PVR which is a little ironic in that Topfield were not given a chance in the certified boxes and now it looks as if the only certified DTT PVR box is likely to be Topfield.
It's the Topfield. It's a pretty cool machine in some ways. There's plenty of unofficial software that lets you do stuff with it. But if there's a way to view the recordings you've booked in one place, we haven't found it. Freeview will have their work cut out to make it somewhere near as usable as MySky is.
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Freeview seem to me to have missed the bus by not having a MYSKY equivalent at launch date.
I have one, but it doesn't have the official Freeview EPG and it's a satellite decoder. The boxes available later in the year will be Freeview HD ones.
You got a Topfield eh? I just bought a SatMate with a PVR in it off TradeMe for $400. The FV works fine (the EPG is lacking - only tells you what is screening now) but can't for the life of me get the PVR sorted.
And the manual makes no sense ...
Prime on FV in 2010?? Gimme a break - someone should legislate now! We own the airwaves, not the broadcasters. Make them play ball ...
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well as I said the standards aren't written down anywhere, I don't think they are exactly secret, just not written down anywhere - in particular as I understand it the future EPG data (the next 2 weeks or so as needed by a PVR) is in a new non standard format (a nice person at Foo Camp offered to get me the spec but something under the table is different from publishing it for everyone to see).
Sounds like the current and next program data running in the PMT stream is in the standard format though which is why you can see what you do - you can see a similar effect on the non-pvr Sky boxes which have crappy firmware that forgets the guide for several minutes every hour, usually at just the time when you want to decide what to watch next, but when in that state can still tell you what you're watching
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Russell, if I understand this correctly, the cost to upgrade to HD for people with the current digital box, which is most people, will be $599 plus $10 a month on the subscription? The Sky TV website has no detail beyond promotional information about the wonders of HD. While I can accept that there is a benefit in having the HD 'mySky' features, and paying for that, how can they possibly justify an increase in the monthly charges? It seems a good old fashioned rort to me.
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Stanley....
If picture quality is not important to you, it may appear that you are paying an extra $10 a week for "nothing"...
Most people will feel they are being delivered a "better" product when they see the HD picture on their screen... and it's a fairly ordinary business practice to charge extra money for a better product/service.
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Sorry... $10 per month. $10 a week extra would indeed be a steep price...
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Russell, if I understand this correctly, the cost to upgrade to HD for people with the current digital box, which is most people, will be $599 plus $10 a month on the subscription? The Sky TV website has no detail beyond promotional information about the wonders of HD. While I can accept that there is a benefit in having the HD 'mySky' features, and paying for that, how can they possibly justify an increase in the monthly charges? It seems a good old fashioned rort to me.
The upgrade cost if you have an existing MySky is only $49. But they're going to have to do something with those old MySky boxes. I wonder if they might become available at a lower price. I'll see if I can find out.
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I think Stanley has raised an interesting point.
If you buy a FreeView HD box you pay a one off cost and receive improved picture quality. Yet with Sky you pay to get the box, then each month to receive the picture. While I appreciate that Sky is a business, the fact that they are a monopoly provider should surely place some additional constraint on them. We're being spun that this is a great deal, but $120 per year, ongoing...
This leads to another question - when will we ever get 'a la carte' programming? I don't see why we cannot have a greater say in relation to the channels we want to pay to watch. Why do I have to receive a whole host of other rubbish if I just want the sports and news channels. Sure, I want to watch the sport in hi-def, but maybe I don't want to see what they have on the "Box-Vibe" channels in HD.
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How can you mention freeviewHD and "sky is a monopoly" in the same post?
I don't have Sky and I also don't have freeview.... and I may take up one of those offerings either soon, or when I'm forced to when analog broadcast gets turned off... but they ARE competitors...
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Why do I have to receive a whole host of other rubbish if I just want the sports and news channels.
Amen! Simon, we should start a club.
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I'm probably actually going to pass on MySkyHD - mostly because apart from TV3, I don't get any of the HD channels - when they bring up TV1/2/Discovery/Documentary/etc channels in HD I'll probably think again
Of course really I'd like to just roll my own Sky box, but in my corner of the business one doesn't just run off and implement someones crypto without permission, even if you know how
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FletcherB - I should have clarified that I was referring to a monopoly in Sport. Apologies.
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Of course really I'd like to just roll my own Sky box, but in my corner of the business one doesn't just run off and implement someones crypto without permission, even if you know how.
It would be ungentlemanly.
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Sign me up to the Club too. I just called Sky. It seems that you can indeed get the HD mySky for $49 if you are not a current mySky subscriber, but you then have to pay $15 a month for the box and the $10 a month for the service, ongoing. Added to my already $81 a month for basic, sport and movies, that makes $106 a month or $1,272 a year! I will pass on it too.
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no - it's a practical thing - I do this sort of crypto for a living, it's a somewhat paranoid part of the business - secrecy is ingrained (Sky's crypto is reputedly done by a bunch of ex-Mossad people) and given the long history of broadcast crypto and crypto-hacking somewhat understandable.
From my point of view Sky is actually a long shot potential customer alienating them would be a bad thing
For the record (and I do find I keep having to tell random strangers this) sure, I know lots of people's crypto secrets - but because of the way modern crypto is done I honestly don't know how to steal digital TV .... unless you can show me how to factor large primes
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Most people will feel they are being delivered a "better" product when they see the HD picture on their screen... and it's a fairly ordinary business practice to charge extra money for a better product/service.
The problem that I can see with SKY is because of their large bouquet they can compress channels at will so who knows what you will get on the day on a channel. Already they can squeeze channels when they show a blockbuster movie to ensure good quality but in later repeats the do not allow the same bandwidth. Will the same apply with HD
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