Free HD Channels?

Are there any satellite channels that broadcast in HD that are not SKY?? If
there are what would I need to receive them and what would it cost?

Any links appreciated.

Chris

Chris Lewis wrote:
Are there any satellite channels that broadcast in HD that are not SKY?? If
there are what would I need to receive them and what would it cost?

The BBC HD channel, although on Sky's HD Platform, is also receivable on any
HD satellite receiver. It's unencrypted, unlike the Sky HD channels, although
it's still a test service, so programming is rather repetitive, but if you
like Bleak House.....


--
Mark
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"Chris Lewis" wrote in message
...
Are there any satellite channels that broadcast in HD that are not SKY??
If there are what would I need to receive them and what would it cost?

Any links appreciated.

Chris


www.virginmedia.com give you a rented V+ box for HD television but they dont
have sky stuff anymore, I am getting one as I cant get a sky signal from my
flat..so wtf..its free as I have an additional set top box in bedroom on a
digital TV....and HD channels are sparse, VM do this 3 for £30 deal or 2 for
£20 deals....

skidz



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"Chris Lewis" wrote in message
...
Are there any satellite channels that broadcast in HD that are not SKY??
If there are what would I need to receive them and what would it cost?

Humax HD receiver circa £220 plus practically any dish. Initially it will
cost more to install than Sky but you have the satisfaction of not paying
any blood money to that cocksucking ******* from Australia.

(kim)

"kim" wrote in message
news
"Chris Lewis" wrote in message
...
Are there any satellite channels that broadcast in HD that are not SKY??
If there are what would I need to receive them and what would it cost?

Humax HD receiver circa £220 plus practically any dish. Initially it will
cost more to install than Sky but you have the satisfaction of not paying
any blood money to that cocksucking ******* from Australia.

(kim)

Bly me is that not a bit stronk???
To call im cocksucking and a ******* - OK But to call im the Australian iss
to stronk!!

--
Viddlêr Sêllbøê

The only true lesbians are men
Shavkat Mirziyayev

On 24 Mar, 21:34, "Chris Lewis" wrote:
Are there any satellite channels that broadcast in HD that are not SKY?? If
there are what would I need to receive them and what would it cost?

As others have said, you need a dish and a receiver; there are three
fairly readily available HD receivers at the moment - Humax HDCI-2000,
Pace DS810XE and Topfield HSCI7700.

If you have a dish already set up for Sky, you'll be able to use the
same one to get BBC HD; the Humax receiver (the only one I've had my
hands on so far) has a pass-through port, so you could plug the Sky
box into the back and use that for most channels, and the Humax for
HD.

If you're starting from scratch, it's not actually as hard as you
might imagine to set up a dish - I've just described the process for
Active Home magazine. With a receiver like the ones above, as well as
the BBC HD trial, you'll be able to get various other services,
including France 24, Al Jazeera English, Russia Today, Euro News and
CNN, so you can broaden your outlook. There are tons of shopping and
religious channels you can watch without any sub too.

If you add a second dish, or a second LNB, there are additional
channels elsewhere; I've just added an LNB for the Astra 1 satellite,
which has lots of contiental stuff on it; in HD you'll find Anixe,
ProSieben and Sat.1 - though a lot of the stuff on those last two is
upscaled, there are some things like Desperate Housewives in HD,
though with a german only soundtrack. Most free channels don't have
english. Anixe shows some Bundesliga games in HD at weekends, though
from my dodgy german it looks as it they're a few weeks old - www.anixehd.tv
- plus films and some series like Roswell, again in German.

Besides the HD stuff, you'll also be able to get CNBC Europe, which is
in English, and the full english France 24 (on Astra 2 it timeshares
with the french for some of the day). Polyglots can also enjoy things
like Arte (French/German), TV5monde, Rai Uno and a few others.

Nigel.

On Mar 26, 11:24 am, "Nigel Whitfield" wrote:

As others have said, you need a dish and a receiver; there are three
fairly readily available HD receivers at the moment - Humax HDCI-2000,
Pace DS810XE and Topfield HSCI7700.

I know someone, who partly on the strength of my recommendation of
Toppy's DTT box, bought one of their satellite boxes. He says it's
absolutely awful. I wonder how good or bad their HD effort is ?

On 26 Mar, 11:30, "Mark Carver" wrote:
I know someone, who partly on the strength of my recommendation of
Toppy's DTT box, bought one of their satellite boxes. He says it's
absolutely awful. I wonder how good or bad their HD effort is ?

No idea; the HD box isn't a PVR.

What's his complaint with the satellite one? As far as I know, the PVR
units are pretty much the same as the DTT one, though I think the
tuning may be a bit fiddlier.

Nigel.

kim wrote:
"Chris Lewis" wrote in message
...
Are there any satellite channels that broadcast in HD that are not SKY??
If there are what would I need to receive them and what would it cost?

Humax HD receiver circa £220 plus practically any dish. Initially it will
cost more to install than Sky but you have the satisfaction of not paying
any blood money to that cocksucking ******* from Australia.

Paul Robinson?

Nigel Whitfield wrote:
On 26 Mar, 11:30, "Mark Carver" wrote:
I know someone, who partly on the strength of my recommendation of
Toppy's DTT box, bought one of their satellite boxes. He says it's
absolutely awful. I wonder how good or bad their HD effort is ?

No idea; the HD box isn't a PVR.

What's his complaint with the satellite one? As far as I know, the PVR
units are pretty much the same as the DTT one, though I think the
tuning may be a bit fiddlier.

I asked him, and below is his report :-

Quote:-

"I bought the Topfield TF5000PVR Masterpiece, and wouldn't consider buying
anything else under that brand, and would dissuade anyone else from doing
so - even the UK terrestrial PVR, which I understand is based on the
satellite version. In my opinion it barely passes the three criteria of the
Sale of Goods act, viz, being as described in the advertising literature,
being fit for its purpose and being of merchantable quality.

1) The operating system is unstable and the box crashes frequently,
especially when recording and playing back simultaneously, with certain
loss of the recording and occasional corruption of stored data which
requires a factory reset and tedious re-entry of all the settings.

2) Up-to-date software is not transmitted as advertised. The current
offering is earlier than, or the same as, the software that the box was
supplied with, dated Nov 2005.

3) The user interface is dreadful, being utterly counterintuitive, and
would require a detailed manual in order to understand it.

4) The user manual is incomplete and confusing, and would only be
acceptable were the software intuitive to use. For example the [very
irritating and impossible to edit afterwards] keyboard for text entry is
not described at all. The Mediahighway epg is not described properly either
and I still do not understand it. Likewise the functionality and reasoning
behind most menu options is ignored or explained incomprehensibly.

5) The menus are illogical. The same settings can be made in several
different menus and it is unclear which values are particular to one entry
and which are global. The LNB and Diseqc menus are particularly confusing
in this respect. You can make a change in one menu and find that the change
is global, but can only be changed back satellite by satellite.

5) Astonishingly there is no way to edit the satellite and transponder
lists (the routines present in the non-PVR version are missing). You can
add transponder parameters manually or automatically but cannot delete
them, so presumably the lists just get bigger and bigger until the machine
bursts. You cannot add, delete or rename satellites. You cannot change the
order of satellites or transponders. You cannot display the PID data for
services, though you can use it for 'advanced' transponder scanning (but
not all services are found - the BBCi AV Streams0-6 for example - even when
the PIDs are entered).

6) There are numerous ways to select channels in a variety of lists. But
you never know which channel you are going to land on if you press any
particular button (the channel up/down buttons are a liability). This is
particuarly awkward with a steerable dish, which gets sent across the sky
ad lib. Pressing the OK/List button often gives you a channel list for a
different satellite from the one you are watching. Also in menus, some
selections are 'live' resulting in the dish hurtling off all over the place
while you are simply navigating.

7) Sorting of lists is poor or non-existent. Favourites can only added to
the end or deleted. There is some sort of sorting for the channel lists,
but I have never made it work. There are adjacent entries of channels from
different satellites which is just baffling. And there is not enough info
on the screen to identify channels uniquely without swapping menus all the
time to glean extra details.

6) Timer event are listed in the order they were entered rather than in
date order, which makes reviewing them very difficult. Also many of the
settings are impossible to change once set. You have to delete the entry
and start again. Currently my machine refuses to accept new entries for
radio recordings, wanting to assign them to a fictitious 'Tuner 3'.
Agreeing to that causes the machine to crash at recording time and
repeatedly at startup throughout the recording period. It needs rebooting
with a sledgehammer.

7) Different buttons have different functions depending on what is on the
screen - ie what mode the machine decides it is in at the time. It is
possible to press the same button twice and find that the second time it
has caused an unexpected change that takes some time to recover from.

8) Manipulation of recorded material is poor. There is no reverse jog on
playback for example, and the +30s button turns into a jump-to-bookmark
button (see 7 above) when one has been created. Bookmarks are impossible to
delete. They also appear to be created ad-lib by the operating system.
There is no way of monitoring a timer recording that has just started, for
confidence purposes, while in playback mode. Also the on-screen blobs that
pop up during such events (and at almost every button-push) are impossible
to turn off, and become very irritating.

9) Implementation of DVB subtitles is poor. When compared with teletext
subtitles in the same stream, or DVB subtitles on the equivalent DTT
service, they are poorly synchronised and do not appear to respond to the
erase page bit, so that an old subtitle clutters up the screen when there
is no dialogue. Worse, with DVB subtitles active the screen sometimes
explodes into a mass of coloured pixels, or a bright magenta wash, and the
machine shortly therafter crashes.

10) The in-built teletext decoder is passable, but it does not support
fastext, nor does it fully support redefinable characters which are
essential for foreign subtitles. Having the test pages cut into the video,
rather than full-screen, is not acceptable. When I was testing the first
decoder I built in 1976, the temporary interface I rigged up did the same,
and everyone who saw it said they wouldn't fancy teletext if that was how
it was displayed.

11) Editing of recorded programmes is abysmal. More often than not the
machine drops out of editing mode (yellow progress bar displayed) and
pressing the next button produces an unexpected result (see 7 above). It
routinely takes several attempts merely to chop excess material from the
beginning and end of programmes, and the resultant edits have about a
thirty-second accuracy.

12) Programmes are stored under their file names, and so there cannot be
two with the same name in the same folder. This seems very primitive.

13) The games are quite good. I have reached level 40 in the first one,
though every few minutes the whole machine freezes for a few seconds while
the HDD spins down and then immediately up again, making a noise like rusty
bucket.

14) Topfield customer support is essentially non-existent, being accessed
via their web site which my browser cannot navigate fully. Like everything
else of Topfield's, it appears to have been written so that only those with
esoteric proprietory software approved by them can use it. A simple e-mail
address would be more convenient, but I can see why they do not publish one."

End Quote



--
Mark
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