Sky+HD

[Shaun]

1TB drive arrived this morning.

Box arrived 1 hr later (fitted in 10 mins.).

As soon as the installer had gone I fitted the 1TB drive (had to use XP as my Win 7 laptop wouldn't recognise and initialise the 1TB drive).

Powered it up - noisy as hell.

Re-fitted original drive and did a planner rebuild - quite as a mouse.

Methinks I need a different 1TB drive ...

Cheers,
Shaun

 

[Shaun]

Samsung drive now destined for either the home PC or a USB caddy.

This evening, however, I managed to copy everything over to a Seagate 1TB Pipeline HD2 drive and it works great and is lovely and quiet.

Jobs a good'un ...

 

[Coco]

That's interesting as I'd read the Samsung drives were the preferred option.

 

[Shaun]

Nothing wrong with the Samsung drive itself - it works perfectly - but my Sky+HD box is housed in a wooden TV cabinet and because the Samsung spins at 7200rpm it makes a fairly audible hummmmmm sound when sat on the wooden shelf ...

I could probably have found a way around it, but didn't want to go to that degree when simply fitting another - slower spinning - drive did the trick.

I'm confortable taking IT stuff apart and twiddling with it so that seemed like the best route for me.

Cheers,
Shaun

 

[Ghost Donkey]

My parents got it after buying a very expensive HD TV. They were going to watch sky SD on it until I pointed out there was not point having a top of the range telly unless you put something decent into it. It's a good improvement on the SD stuff and looks OK but as with all real time encoded pictures it is generally lagging behind the disc formats. By definition it has to be unless you want to pay a lot more for your TV. The BBC have their own bandwidth and only pay sky to be on their EPG so the quality is generally better. If I had a HD telly I'd go for it.

 

[marinyork]

My parents got it after buying a very expensive HD TV. They were going to watch sky SD on it until I pointed out there was not point having a top of the range telly unless you put something decent into it. It's a good improvement on the SD stuff and looks OK but as with all real time encoded pictures it is generally lagging behind the disc formats. By definition it has to be unless you want to pay a lot more for your TV. The BBC have their own bandwidth and only pay sky to be on their EPG so the quality is generally better. If I had a HD telly I'd go for it.

Bit of an odd thing to say as since the new codecs rammed down to very low bitrates BBC HD is generally perceived to be one of the very weakest channels. The BBC have their own bandwidth and flush much of it down the toilet sadly.

 

[Shaun]

I've been holding off for years, but I'm really pleased I finally plumbed for it. We've only got a 32" HD TV, but it still looks fantastic.

The ladies of the house cannot tell the difference, so I'm really the only one who appreciates it, but I've been cramming the HD movies in - the main attraction for HD for me in the first place - and I'm suitably impressed.

I haven't spent enough time on the various channels to notice any major differences in quality, but I was surprised by the fact that SD programs are shown on the HD channels. I suppose it's logical if things weren't made in HD, but I hadn't considered that beforehand and assumed that all of the HD channel content would be HD.

Cheers,
Shaun

 

[Ghost Donkey]

Bit of an odd thing to say as since the new codecs rammed down to very low bitrates BBC HD is generally perceived to be one of the very weakest channels. The BBC have their own bandwidth and flush much of it down the toilet sadly.

I'm a bit out of touch . I've been out of broadcasting for a couple of years now and have less contact with people I know still involved of late. I understood the beeb still paid for their own bandwidth with the satellite provider so they were unaffected by the dynamic codec compression and subsequent variable quality. I'm presuming that's stil the case as freesat exists and expected the quality to be higher still. It's a shame if they've dropped their bit rate but at the same time it can't be cheap and have to justify costs etc.

 

[marinyork]

I haven't spent enough time on the various channels to notice any major differences in quality, but I was surprised by the fact that SD programs are shown on the HD channels. I suppose it's logical if things weren't made in HD, but I hadn't considered that beforehand and assumed that all of the HD channel content would be HD.

100% of BBC HDs output is HD which people always generously rate that as a good thing, except that's not true! The individual programmes are rated as HD or not, they are allowed up to 25% of lower grade material. When watching the olympics for example it becomes painfully apparent what 100% HD means. Still a good channel, just infuriating the way they run it. Upscaling makes a much more sense than the way they do it because you don't have programme clashes or endless confusion with five or six channels competing for 3 hours prime time.

There's so much upscaled because the broadcasters are years behind the schedule for kitting out their studios. The BBC and sky are extremely busy at this.

 

[marinyork]

I'm a bit out of touch . I've been out of broadcasting for a couple of years now and have less contact with people I know still involved of late. I understood the beeb still paid for their own bandwidth with the satellite provider so they were unaffected by the dynamic codec compression and subsequent variable quality. I'm presuming that's stil the case as freesat exists and expected the quality to be higher still. It's a shame if they've dropped their bit rate but at the same time it can't be cheap and have to justify costs etc.

Yes, they have the space on astra 2D. They have an entire transponder that has 2 BBC variants and BBC HD on. People wouldn't mind so much but the space isn't being utilised properly, people really want a second BBC HD channel and the BBC staff get incredibly ratty about stuff.

Freesat's doing all right, unfortunately due to how tight space is on 2D (including the BBC wasting it) all the promises about C4 HD and Fiver and Five US are disappointingly still as untrue as they were a year and a half ago . I think it's probably going to hurt them quite a lot when the low down will be something like this in the summer :-

Freesat BBC HD & ITV HD and missing some key channels
Freeview BBC HD, ITV HD, Channel4 HD
Virgin Media something like 12 HD channels
Sky 40 HD channels.

with the latter 2 having quite a few "freeview" channels such as e4, film4 and Five being in HD on their platform(s) and nowhere else.