sky plus

[nielm]

I visited a friend in the UK the other day who had a skyplus box... I was interested to see what a multi-million pound company with near-infinite development resources could do when making a PVR user interface... This is the first STB PVR that I have ever used!

My first impressions (and second and third) were that it was just terrible:

• very very slow response times for any user action
• it seems that to get any information about in the EPG, it needs to wait for the info to be broadcast (as opposite to caching it locally on the HDD)
• no way at all of searching the EPG for programs (you need to know when it is scheduled)
• no time bar on playback (!)
• a combined sheduled recordings / saved recordings list meant that if you record a lot of shows, that list gets very full very quickly
• no complex 'favorites' at all -- if you want to record 'Dora the explorer' , you get all the episodes, all the time!
• apparantly no intelligent disk space management!
• menus don't remember where you were, so if you browse the EPG to channel 387, watch something, then go back to the EPG, you are back at channel 001!
• but the biggest annoyance for me was that you could not browse the menus while watching something! Any return to the menus, stopped (not just paused) playback, and if you wanted to restart it, you had to go find it in the recordings list/epg!
• no plugins!!

Plus points are that the picture quality was (of course) perfect, and the integrated EPG was complete and is auto-updating and hence (theoretically) very reliable (eg for sports overruns), but the useability (for me) was just aweful...

It just made me realise how spoilt I am with Sage's features! I am willing to accept the slight blurryness associated with analogue cable + SVideo-out (which is of course fixable if I get a decent TV with VGA input!), in return for a much more useable UI.

Or is it just me being picky, I mean thousands, if not millions of people have Sky+ boxes. Surely Sky might have noticed one or 2 useability complaints!

Ah well, the benefits of a monopoly. (for the non-UK-ians, Sky has a effective monopoly over all consumer satellite TV in the UK: if you want the 'normal' UK channels by satellite, you have to get Sky.)

[Mahoney]

if you want the 'normal' UK channels by satellite, you have to get Sky

Not totally true; several channels are broadcast in the clear and so need no Sky equipment to view them, including all the BBC ones. Most people get them via Sky, though.

Sky+ has a few massive benefits over Sage:

1) Two satellite tuners able to record all subscribed channels at no image loss
2) EPG info far better than XMLTV can produce from the RT website, as you mention
3) Most of all - you plug it in and it works. No install, no configuration, no speccing up your PC; it just works.

There is no legal way to achieve 1) with Sage (there may not be a practical one, either - even with a CAM that can do it, you'll only get one tuner running and current CAMs can't do card updates so it has to go back in the box every few weeks, not exactly ideal... Other even less legal methods do not, I've read, work well enough for use).

2) should be possible, there is code out there to get the EPG from the satellite stream, but it certainly isn't available in Sage yet. MediaPortal has it, apparently. I have my own ideas about integrating it, but my attempts to get hold of a DVB-S stream in Java have been a complete failure so far and I'm short of time.

3) Sage are working on it, of course - native DVB support is a step in the right direction. But it is inherent in the different products that Sage will never come close to the simplicity of installation and configuration, and lack of maintenance, of Sky+.

[rickgillyon]

Originally Posted by nielm

Or is it just me being picky, I mean thousands, if not millions of people have Sky+ boxes.

I think it's an "expectations" issue.
My Dad has Sky+, and he'll sing its praises to anyone who listens. I'll ask him where keyword favourites are, how he can take recordings away with him, how he can convert or burn them - but he's just a guy who watches TV.

Previously he had Sky and a VCR, and the VCR was beyond him and his wife - between them they'd record the wrong programme 50% of the time, the other 50% it would be a fuzzy recording. Now he records what he wants every time, can set it to record an entire series, and finds it easy to manage. No substitute for SageTV, but that would confuse the hell out of him!

So for the target audience, it's a godsend. For us geeks, it's not good enough...

(So you need that option on your poll!)

[Mahoney]

On the EPG, I think you would need to have a network encoder running the DVB-S card, as then you could have your own stand-alone app that knows exactly what the state of the DVB-S card is. Whenever it is not tuned to a programme channel, it can be tuned to the EPG channel. It can maintain an in memory representation of the EPG, and as info comes down the channel it can compare that with the in-memory representation to see if it is different. It could then store the differences, and every 15 minutes if there are differences it could use nielm's webserver to trigger an EPG update. A new EPG plugin could then connect to it over RPC and get these specific updates (as I recall nielm demonstrated some time ago that Sage is capable of just updating its EPG, it doesn't discard the entire thing and start again).

None of this, of course, would work with the integrated Sage DVB-S support, sadly. That would require Sage to implement the EPG data gathering. I gather than Sky use MHW, a scheme that is used by other providers, too, so there may be benefit to more than just the UK from implementing it.

[Mahoney]

if you want the 'normal' UK channels by satellite, you have to get Sky

Incidentally, it's worth expanding on this a bit. The way Sky locks other providers down to requireing Sky kit is that since it is the de facto standard way to get satellite in the UK, if you want people to watch your stuff you need to be in the Sky EPG. You can get yourself in the Sky EPG with an unencrypted channel, but it costs money; you get a significant discount if you agree to your channel being encrypted, and hence requiring a Sky box to view it.

There is a move from the main channels to go unencrypted; BBC already has, and ITV were talking about it. Can't remember about Channels 4 and 5. Indeed, BBC and ITV were talking about a joint satellite "service" at one point - which I presume would mean that they would provide a satellite and a box with an EPG to allow you to access their satellite content without needing to bother Sky at all.

[Mark SS]

Originally Posted by nielm

Or is it just me being picky, I mean thousands, if not millions of people have Sky+ boxes. Surely Sky might have noticed one or 2 useability complaints!

As the others have commented, its basically great for the vast majority of people i.e. those that used to use a vcr with difficulty. I bought one for my parents many years ago and they loved it!

Would I go from Sage back to a Sky (or any other) DVR? Very very unlikely. Would I reccomend a Sage installation to many of my friends? Probably not yet. Once it gets to the stage where I can install it in an hour and not tweak something once a week, I'll be reccomending it to everyone. For the time being, I extoll its virtues to my technically able friends and colleagues, but not to those that don't understand the concept of a DVB-S card

[doc]

You may have read on the UK threads that Sky have introduced web based scheduling for Sky Plus. You log onto sky's own webservers, check the recording schedule, and it then updates your requests down to your sky plus box. You can also schedule recordings via text now, but I think they cost 50p per text!

Sky have recently introduced a more restrictive pin code for watching movies out of their permitted time slots. On 'normal' sky, you have to enter a pin to watch a 15 movie thats on in the afternoon. Thats rather annoying when you use Sage as you get 2 hours of "enter pin" recorded. If you watch a 15 in its official timeslot - after 8pm, then it records ok. (I could be wrong with the ratings, I haven't been to the movies in ages).

Sky Plus will record the shows at any time of the day, but they restrict the playback until after the watershed time by asking for the pin number. This pin number is the same pin number that would then allow your kids access to the 'free' adult channels. There is a single pin for all parental controls. Its not ideal by any means.

I do like Sky Plus, for what it is. I don't use it to record TV any more as I like having the option to copy them off to a USB hard drive and watch them in the week, or to placeshift. If all you do is sit at home every evening then its fine for that. The series link feature is pretty abysmal and frequently stops for no reason.

Also, to watch a recording you have to be receiving a satellite signal. If you record a movie one day, and then cancel your subscription, it will not let you watch the recording. If theres a thunderstorm, you can't watch your recording. And if you want to copy off a movie, you have to play it back in real time to your PVR card in your PC/laptop and record it. You can't watch another channel while this is happening, which is damn frustrating.

I'd recommend Sage to my IT colleagues that I think are capable of coping with it. Our manager has been trying to get me to install it on his pc for about a year, but as he struggles to send and receive emails, he'd constantly be on the phone to me and I'd probably end up on a GBH charge.

I'm off to New Zealand in 2 days to visit zzmystique so I'll get the chance to see Sage in use over there, and see how their satellite system compares to Sky.

(Yes, I've edited this 5 times to remove spelling mistakes!)

[brewston]

Yeah, its a horses for courses thing... for the man on the street who wants to move away from video, its awesome. for someone who likes to tinker then its very restrictive...

I looked into getting Sky+ when I set up my Sage box but found it too restrictive and liked the fact that at the end of the day, Sage runs on a PC and records in a portable file format. From what I heard the Sky recordings are encrypted (if you could even get them off there, short of pulling the disk out (and I bet its not NTFS/FAT32))

I've got a Sky box (Freesat, the non subscription one) and a Sage PC on 2 different inputs on the TV. I kept the Sky box to keep my wife happy while I played around with Sage but now she's caught on to getting TV when she wants so much so that I have to arrange downtime windows! (Its like being back at work)

Tim

[pschweig]

Originally Posted by doc

I'm off to New Zealand in 2 days to visit zzmystique so I'll get the chance to see Sage in use over there, and see how their satelite system compares to Sky.

Pretty similar I think. NZ is right in Murdoch's back yard. I think it's even called Sky.

[doc]

Yes its similar, theres just soooooo few channels compared to the UK, though the customer base is a lot smaller too.

They have freeview boxes here that run off the satellite input, and they have an output that goes back into the sky box for normal satellite. I've not heard of this in the UK, does anyone know of freeview boxes that work this way in the UK, it would save me running more cables around the house.