Sky+ box freezes at same time every Thursday

To be precise, it has frozen at 8,30pm on each of the last 3 Thursdays
while about to watch A Place in France on Ch4 while recording something
on BBC2. Symptoms are the same each week -- gradual deterioration of
the picture over 5 minutes (increasing pixellation then breakup)
followed by a blue screen and no way out short of power cycling the
Pace V2 box.

Am I alone or does Ch4 do something irregular at this time on a
Thursday? Or could it be coinciding with some routine Sky admin? It's
possible it has nothing to do with Ch4 and that the same thing would
happen while watching other channels.

I've checked outside in case an airship goes sailing by at that time
but there's nothing going on - and my neighbours are all at least 200
yards away.

The only thing I can think of which may be relevant is that Thursday
nights are always heavy recording nights for me and I invariably have 6
or 8 programmes set to record later in the evening - compared to
probably no more than 2 any other evening.

Stan

On Fri, 05 Mar 2004 08:02:47 +0000, Stan The Man
wrote:

To be precise, it has frozen at 8,30pm on each of the last 3 Thursdays
while about to watch A Place in France on Ch4

And by a strange coincidence I mentioned to my wife that we couldn't
get the first 90 seconds of the programme on Sky Digital and had to
revert to analogue (last night). All other channels I tried on Sky
were fine - just CH4 with no signal.

--
Hiram Hackenbacker

"Stan The Man" wrote in message
...
To be precise, it has frozen at 8,30pm on each of the last 3 Thursdays
while about to watch A Place in France on Ch4 while recording something
on BBC2. Symptoms are the same each week -- gradual deterioration of
the picture over 5 minutes (increasing pixellation then breakup)
followed by a blue screen and no way out short of power cycling the
Pace V2 box.

No, it wasn't just you! For me I started to get pixellation at around 8.15
then the picture froze. Changed to analogue then changed back after a couple
of minutes to find the Sky+ box rebooting. Then I got a blue screen on Ch4
with the technical problem banner. This lasted for another 15 minutes or so
before the picture was restored.

I have recollections of similar things happening last week on Ch4, but
whether it was at the same time I can't remember.

To be precise, it has frozen at 8,30pm on each of the last 3 Thursdays
while about to watch A Place in France on Ch4 while recording something

CH4 definitely died on my Panny non-Sky+ box around 20.20 and was back by
about 20.40. Analogue was fine (Crystal Palace), no apology from CH4 during
or after.

I added the CH4 TP from the "Other Channels" and none of them were working
although they were all available from the "Add Channels" list on the TP. E4
was also gone but E4+1 was available.

Cheers,
Dave

In article , Hiram Hackenbacker
wrote:

On Fri, 05 Mar 2004 08:02:47 +0000, Stan The Man
wrote:

To be precise, it has frozen at 8,30pm on each of the last 3 Thursdays
while about to watch A Place in France on Ch4

And by a strange coincidence I mentioned to my wife that we couldn't
get the first 90 seconds of the programme on Sky Digital and had to
revert to analogue (last night). All other channels I tried on Sky
were fine - just CH4 with no signal.

I just got a callback from a Ch4 engineer who told me they had a 90sec
failure in their digital network at 8.29pm last Thursday. They said
that the symptoms should have been colour bars but full audio - and not
a Sky+ freeze... albeit their monitoring equipment is Sony and
Panasonic kit, not Pace. They were at a loss to explain why I suffered
the same problems exactly 1 week earlier.

Stan

Stan The Man wrote:

I just got a callback from a Ch4 engineer who told me they had a 90sec
failure in their digital network at 8.29pm last Thursday. They said
that the symptoms should have been colour bars but full audio - and not
a Sky+ freeze

Make that 10 minutes from about 20:20

The entire C4 output was down for that time with a no signal at all
so it's not surprising that the Sky+ didn't like it.

--
Digibox problem? : A reboot solves 90% of these.
The Sky Digital FAQ: http://tinyurl.com/yvnsy
How to get UK TV overseas: http://tinyurl.com/6p73
Fed up with logos / red buttons? : http://logofreetv.org/
BBC gone? : http://www.astra2d.co.uk/
----
Only the truth as I see it.
No monies return'd. ;-)