Freeview TV

5 Oct 2005

Quote by EnglishChris99
If you are receiving CHANNEL 5 on your existing ariel you should be able to connect your freeview up, no problem. My opinion, and it is my own personal opinion FREEVIEW will not be FREE when everyone in the british isles is cut off from analogue tv and forced to go digital. They are doing what SKY did when they started out but you got there boxes FREE, remember. Now your paying through the nose for which of not nearly half you will watch every month. Oh i do babble on don't i. Hope this helps. cya

Which is fine except the BBC is obligated under its charter to provide free access TV. ITV Channel4 and Channel 5 also spent a lot of money getting licences to broadcast free to the masses. Any joker can get a cable or satilite channel, but these guys spend a fortune making sure their channels are free to view because its the only way they can sell advertising, by promising audience share 50 times that of sky 1.
So you won't see the Free dissappear from Freeview... it wasn't set up to make money that way.
Turning off the analog signal is just a way for the government to make money selling off this part of the spectrum for other uses... just think of the money they made from the 3G licenses... its that all over again.
They, the chanels, will probably stay free... but you can bet that the price of the boxes will go up when the analuge goes off.
The stupid thing with digital is that its great... right up to the point the signla drops and the whole thing drops out or freezes, DAB car radios seriously suffer with lots of blackouts where as with analogue the quality gets worse untill it can pick up a more powerfull signal.
Also its obvious that the analogue feed is now digital converted to analogue as the normal TV stations (Especially C5 and C4) are doing the freeze and blue screens... so if they cant even get the links between transmitters correct what hope do they have of getting a full time digital signal to set top boxes.
Its a bit like the bullshit spouted over CD's V Records/tapes and how they would last forever... unlike a tape or record where the quality degrades but still works a CD just dies when it gets one mark to many, or the backing foil peels off. The same is now happening with DVD's refusing to play after only a year of use; they need much better care than the original tapes/records.

5 Oct 2005

Quote by piercedJon
Also its obvious that the analogue feed is now digital converted to analogue as the normal TV stations (Especially C5 and C4) are doing the freeze and blue screens... so if they cant even get the links between transmitters correct what hope do they have of getting a full time digital signal to set top boxes.
Its a bit like the bullshit spouted over CD's V Records/tapes and how they would last forever... unlike a tape or record where the quality degrades but still works a CD just dies when it gets one mark to many, or the backing foil peels off. The same is now happening with DVD's refusing to play after only a year of use; they need much better care than the original tapes/records.

Thing that bugs me is if you watch channel 5 (especially movies and later at night)... you can tell they are playing off of digital now.. and rather low quality.. you can see all this colour banding and artifacts, which actually makes for a worse picture.
In fact digital TV in general provides a degraded picture over the traditional analog signal... you can clearly make out all the compression artifacts... which I find anoying.. would be worse if you had a nice big TV.
This is only progress in so far as the number of channels you can recieve.. and all that means is the good programs are spread more thinly over the ground... this really isn't a good example of forward progress.!!
As for CD's deteriorating, that is because manufacturers now build flaws into a pre-recorded CD, the intent is that its more difficult to copy because the CD burner might fail the disk. This is a rather crappy copy protection, as it doesn't work well. It relies on the in built error correction within CD players to make up for the degraded quality... although in some cases and with some CD players you will hear a degredation in playback quality if your player is not able to fix the errors... it also means that CD's are much less resilient to damage as they already have built in damage.
You can prove this to yourself if you have NERO installed on your PC... run the disk quality check (its one of the utilitities) on a CD you have recorded and on a pre-recorded CD... it will show you on a graph just how many errors there are... the self recorded disk should have none or very few.
BTW this isn't me being parinoid and conspiricy theory... its fully documented.. just don't ask me what official site I read it from!!!
DVD's are probably following the same route.
CD's and DVD's have a certain amount of in built error correction.. which is why you used to be able to scratch them to buggery and they worked... now some of this in built error correction is being erroded.

7 Oct 2005

went and bought a freeview box two weeks ago.
set it up and got the grand total of 3 channles!
was so upset when i accidentally dropped it on the floor and had to return it to the shop as broken!!!

7 Oct 2005

Quote by well_busty_babe
went and bought a freeview box two weeks ago.
set it up and got the grand total of 3 channles!
was so upset when i accidentally dropped it on the floor and had to return it to the shop as broken!!!

Out of interest which channels did you manage to get?

7 Oct 2005

Quote by pb4u
went and bought a freeview box two weeks ago.
set it up and got the grand total of 3 channles!
was so upset when i accidentally dropped it on the floor and had to return it to the shop as broken!!!

Out of interest which channels did you manage to get?
chanel m, a news channel and some shopping channel

9 Oct 2005

I've got a Freeview box and it's great as I get loads of channels, both tv and radio.
It seems that it all depends on where you live.
My biggest problem is that I don't watch tv that often, but at Â£29 I consider it was a good buy and value for money.
smile

10 Oct 2005

Quote by Ian_Mids

ian as a fellow ham this should be easy try a 100w of cw at about 14mhz that wipes out all the digi receivers in my house

i can wipe out our elsdest son's digibox real easy, but the one on the main telly downstairs refuses to budge.
Even beaming direct at the tv aerial, running the amplifier full chat, not a sausage.
Dawn's hairdrier on the other hand, crackle crackle etc.
Ian
got a new one for you ian i was runing some psk and took out my digibox and the digiboxes of both neighbours, just a thought

10 Oct 2005

Technology sucks.
Running 100 watts on top band and my dsl stops working....yet 400 watts on 20 and and the freeview works fine, but sky doesn't ?
Stuff it all.

10 Oct 2005

To add my threepennorth - if you haven't got a box yet and can afford to pay Â£125 or thereabouts look for a digibox with a hard drive. No, you dirty SHers, I'm not being rude. You can record on them, up to 40 hours, and pause and rewind live tele.
Lots of people think you have to have a Sky box to do this but you don't and I don't understand why they aren't being advertised more widely. They are brilliant. Imagine the doorbell goes in the middle of E.R. Press pause, deal with it, then carry on watching. Or Press pause for 10 minutes at the beginning of a program then you can fast forward through the ads. Throw out your VCR. Try Humax but there are others.
Jezzay.

10 Oct 2005

Quote by jomu
Technology sucks.
Running 100 watts on top band and my dsl stops working....yet 400 watts on 20 and and the freeview works fine, but sky doesn't ?
Stuff it all.

I had a similar problem, I could cook the TL922 on 10/20/40 and not bother anything, but on 80 it was cats.
Is this a Ham site, have I logged onto the wrong site by mistake :shock: