Freesat Advice

[Andy]

Any of you guys gone down the road of buying a Freesat HD Box?
I've been a Sky+ user for a couple of years now, however a number of issues keep bugging me:

• Intermittent technical problems - fails to record; stops recording; programme freezes; sound stops working
• This has happened since I got it and despite getting the box replaced by a new one (which only comes with a 3 month warranty as opposed to 12 months and then they want to charge you for repair or for a maintenance contract!) the same faults keep occurring!
• Have had the receiver replaced on the dish a few months ago which helped some of the faults but not all - managed to get this free of charge
• Realistically - like most of us I suppose, we hardly watch any of what is available.
• £39 a month is a lot to pay for a service that you don't use much of and has intermitten faults. That's the best part of £480 a year.....could spend that on bike stuff!
• I could trim the package down, like having the Sports stuff and Mrs Andy likes the housey type programs, Relocation x 3; Grand Designs: House in the Country etc. etc. blah blah.
• Trimming might only save me a few quid a month though.

Son now heading off to uni so he won't watch as much, so might be time to get rid of it and I was looking at these FreeSat boxes.

have any of you gone down this road, if so is it worth it, what Channels to you get, what is service/picture etc. like. I used to have a Digibox which had a few channels that were ok, but if I could get something that had the main channels and maybe some of the sports stuff (Cycling included obviously) then I'd look at that.

Andy

 

[oxbob]

http://www.freesat.co.uk/index.php?page=whatson.Main

 

[accountantpete]

Have ordered one my dad (it's only £14 fully installed for pensioners) - have been warned that heavy rain etc gives rise to poor reception and I don't think you will get much sport-apart from BBC and ITV.Was warned off the HD boxes until they get the technology sorted -there's only one serious player, Humax, at the moment AFAIK.

 

[ColinJ]

Was warned off the HD boxes until they get the technology sorted -there's only one serious player, Humax, at the moment AFAIK.

I'm just back from a short stay at my sister's house and her husband has just bought a Humax HD Freesat system to feed his huge LCD HDTV. I watched a few normal-def programmes on BBC1 and ITV3 and the picture quality wasn't up to much - in fact, some old programmes looked terrible. I was blaming the TV and/or the Humax box but then I flipped over to the BBC HD channel and was gobsmacked by how good the HD picture was. The Jackal was shown the other night in HD and I'd very recently watched it on my bog-standard analogue TV so I watched it again to see if there was much difference - there was! The scene towards the end where, er, SPOILER (!!!)...



























Bruce Willis (The Jackal) is about to bump off The First Lady with a big gun looked fantastic. There is a huge crowd scene and I could make out details on the clothes worn by people in the middle of the crowd.

I also watched Who Do You Think You Are? and some panoramic shots of the waterfront in Liverpool looked stunning.

There doesn't seem to be much HD material on Freesat at the moment, but when my niece insisted on watching The Bill we discovered that they were broadcasting that in HD (accessible via the Red Button). Flipping between Std-def and HD really showed what a jump in quality is on offer.

I also watched a Blu-ray DVD and that looked pretty stunning. Even some std DVDs looked better in HD when upscaled by the Blu-ray player.

I was a bit sceptical about this new technology, but I'm a convert. It's a pity that for now, 90% of programme material will not be HD, and will possibly not even be widescreen.

Scenic documentaries look fantastic. During the Tour de France on Eurosport recently, many people were writing in saying how great the mountain stages looked in HD***.

Pity I can't afford it yet...


*** PS I don't think that you can buy extra channels such as Eurosport for Freesat. Freeview will start doing HD channels as the big digital switchover takes place.

 

[threebikesmcginty]

We've got Freesat after suffering with a poor Freeview reception for toooo long.
The Freesat is great, we get all the channels available with great picture quality now and the HD is superb.

 

[marinyork]

ColinJ, what you say is right. Things are going to change very, very soon .