Posts by Paul Campbell
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oh where do I start .... I've spent the past 7 years building PVRs for cable/satellite companies in the US - I got a MySky recently and boy does it suck .... so many little things are missing or just wrong - it's a great pity there aren't competing platforms available to encourage
for example why is there no "what did he say" button that skips back 30 seconds? (also called "instant replay' for sports fans) - I can understand them not have the skip forward "ad skip" button - after all they sell advertising but I don't understand not having the opposite
Of course in this case you can do what I did and buy a universal remote and create those missing buttons for yourself .... but there's lots of other useful stuff missing that can't be fixed too (why are the graphics so lackluster? why can't I listen to the news or ads while I search for things to record? why is series link so half hearted? why does searching just suck? why does the guide not go to the channels around the one you're tuned to? two button presses to get to the guide? grid guides are so, well, boring, recording abutted programs doesn't work unless you're lucky about timing ..... all of these things could be better)
I don't know if it's reserving disk space for premium channels, we don't buy them, don't even plug in the phone (it doesn't work with our household telephone exchange) - but good quality HD uses a LOT of space, you shouldn't be surprised if it fills up the disk fast - I'd guess that half of the satellite transponder space (available incoming bandwidth) is used for PPV channels which may be where the "half for premium" meme comes from
On the other hand it has 4 tuners and can record 2 plus play/watch/record one live at the same time - that's actually quite hard to do - it's set up for multiple satellites for the future (you'll need more household wiring and a different LNB if/when the time comes) and there's ports out the back to add your own drives should they deign to allow that (again that's hard to get right and probably only some makes of drives will actually work reliably - that's a nightmare support issue for the manufacturer) - but Tb drives are getting cheap - I'd drop a couple on the back of mine - if the UI for recorded shows didn't look like it won't scale well (why are the things that you've recorded mixed in with the things to be recorded?)
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On Sky? How can they do that? One satellite transmission, no?
Last time I dumped out the Sky DVB tables (this was a while ago, pre HD and pre freeview) the TVNZ channels were in the clear and on their own transponder (with freeview in the offing this makes sense) - from memory there were 3 copies of TV1 with different regional ads. Sky ran 3 regional channel maps
I suspect they dropped that down to make room for TV6/7 - if they want 3 HD channel (plus TV6/7) they'll need a lot more bandwidth - as a plus freeview will probably get HD TV1 too since it's all really the same bits on the same transponders on the same satellite.
It is possible to do smart stuff at the settop end splicing in ads on the fly (requires hardware support in the transport processor), but unless you have some storage on the box (ie mySky only) or maybe stagger the ads wrt some other channel on the same transponder you still need the same peak bandwidth as sending all 3 channels
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but think about the children! - we want them to eat their veges ....
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probably not safe for work but it is Friday - now you realol can give a Flying F**K
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looks like it's back now - I was getting DNS and could traceroute all the way to Sweden too - I wasn't getting anything on the page 9and had no cached favicon) - my guess was that the single IP address was simply blocked somewhere between here and Europe
Even though it works now I can't even traceroute as far as I could last night - really weird
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totally off-topic - seems wikileaks.org is off the air here - looks like it's shit-canned by IP somewhere - could be we've fallen foul of the current Aussie fuss
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I'm not sure they come in XXL ....
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I have to go to bat for the court news - having lived for most of the past 20 years in a Chch sized city with such crime that murders only got reported in the paper if they were someone famous, or were particularly gruesome I've loved coming home to a place where ALL the crime is reported in the paper - I think there's a lot of value in publicly shaming people
Of course the court news is really read by our grandmas .... and if your name shows up there you just know her friends will see it there and she will die of shame ....
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well I do get a physical paper, and cracking it open is very much part of my daily routine - but I bemoan that they keep sending me a sports section that never gets opened - probably I need the kindle version and maybe that's part of the future of newspapers - just news without the paper
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heh - i see they've slated the Dunedin games for Carisbrook and not the mythical new stadium - probably because it can be made to seat half as many again people