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All posts by Félim Doyle

Below are all of Félim Doyle's postings, with the most recent are at the bottom of the page.


How come Five (soon to be Channel 5 again) have both free-to-air on 10773 H 22 5/6 and encrypted versions? How many flavour of Five are their in total? Is there/will there be a Five +1?

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InView EPG death - boxes | Freeview news
Sunday 23 January 2011 1:10PM

Wow! I wasn't even aware that there were multiple, incompatible EPGs on FreeView. I had the impression that even original On Digital and ITV Digital boxes still worked!

That may explain a problem that my wife's great uncle had a few months ago. Luckily the vintage box was originally supplied to him free by a church member so it didn't owe him anything.

He has a new box now although I'm not sure how he obtained it or how much, if anything, he paid for it but he should have been entitled to some assistance with it under the government scheme for the elderly.

He's in Wales where they've been all digital for quite a while, of course.

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Maeve,

You may find that you are in the same position as Jacquie in Greece (see above) as the Five suite of channels have moved to the Astra 1N satellite which has a UK/Ireland focused beam.

There may be small areas of continental Europe, typically coastal areas near to the UK, which can still receive these channels but you may be out of luck.

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Brian,

An excellent presentation on the magic of digital TV! Is it available for download as a PDF for off-line reading?

One minor error I noticed though. Shouldn't "1/32th" be "1/32nd"?

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I'm curious to know why the band-plan graphic above has gaps and why there is no channel 26 at all!

Even if the frequency ranges covered by the gaps are currently assigned to other services for the foreseeable future, surely it would have made sense to use a contiguous sequential numbering system across the entire band.

Where is that elusive channel 26?

Also, when new frequencies are allocated to DVB-T2, will set-top-boxes and TVs automatically recognise them or will we be looking at hardware upgrades?

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Surely this is a retrograde step. As we begin to move toward 4K and beyond, one would expect HD channels to eventually replace their SD counterparts so Channel 4 will have to reinstate the HD service at some stage.

This would be like Channel 4 saying that they are dropping their 625 line service but will continue to broadcast in 405 lines.

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I remember when Channel 4 HD and All4 were dropped from FreeSat in February 2018 apparently due to the punitive carriage charges but I find it hard to believe that Channel 4, a public service broadcaster, couldn't have come to an amicable agreement with FreeSat.

The BBC, UKTV, Virgin Media 'crisis' was resolved in a matter of weeks although I don't know who caved in that instance.

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I re-tuned my mother-in-law's Sony KDL-32S2030 following the relaunch of BBC Three and the replacement of BBC SD channels with their HD counterparts. AFIK, the KDL-32S2030 can only decode MPEG-4 but BBC HD channels are broadcast in MPEG-4. After the re-tune, the TV was only seeing 51 services as against the usual 72 or so and I wondered if any other changes were made which would account for the missing services / channels. What is the best advice on how to restore her missing channels?

My mother-in-law lives in Silverstone, Northamptonshire and receives BBC East (West) / Cambridge from Sandy Heath.

Thanks.

P.S. She does have a Goodmans FreeSat box too but that has been having pixelation issues for a while which I am still investigating.

Flim

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I re-tuned my mother-in-law's Sony KDL-32S2030 following the relaunch of BBC Three and the replacement of BBC SD channels with their HD counterparts. AFIK, the KDL-32S2030 can only decode MPEG-4 but BBC HD channels are broadcast in MPEG-4. After the re-tune, the TV was only seeing 51 services as against the usual 72 or so and I wondered if any other changes were made which would account for the missing services / channels. What is the best advice on how to restore her missing channels?

My mother-in-law lives in Silverstone, Northamptonshire and receives BBC East (West) / Cambridge from Sandy Heath.

Thanks.

Flim

P.S. She does have a Goodmans FreeSat box too but that has been having pixelation issues for a while which I am still investigating.

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