About to get Sky + but....

corm500

Hi there

I am about to get Sky+ this week but I have a few questions. I hope someone can help.

1. Will I need extra equipment to use my old digibox for fta, BBC etc.

2. Can I transfer recordings from Sky+ to my computers hard drive (I can imagine 20 hours getting used up quickly.

3. Is there any places that you would particularily recomend to purchase Sky+ from (Price,Service,Length of time etc.)

Thanks in advance for any help.

Corm500

You will get a quad lnb with the sky plus box so all you need is a third cable from that to your old digibox.
The sky plus will take two feeds and you have two spares so you could have 3 digiboxes working if you want including the Sky plus.

As regards installers, the box price shouldnt vary much, irelands satellite dot ie usually gets rave revies here as you may know.
Other than that Sky may give you a list.

Another obvious tip is to ask people with sky in your area.
They may not necessarilly have sky plus, but they will be able to tell you how they got on with the installer.

Any installer should be able to hook up Sky plus for you.

Indeed some posters here ( I'm thinking of Mossy Monk ) have as far as I can remember done it themselves

shabbyroad

1. Will I need extra equipment to use my old digibox for fta, BBC etc.

You will, after the Sky+ install, have 2 additional feeds from the Quad LNB available and one of these can go to your FTA box. No cards etc needed. See the thread/sticky here for tuning information

2. Can I transfer recordings from Sky+ to my computers hard drive (I can imagine 20 hours getting used up quickly.

I can't say for sure if this is possible or not however the card in the Sky+ box decodes playback from the hard-drive so you would need some way to decrypt the recording coming off the Sky+ HD if you put it into a PC and as we all know...that decryption isn't available.

I've got a Panasonic HS2 which is a combined HDD/DVD-R and I've been using it to 'archive' shows via RGB scart from the Sky+ box. The Sky+ menu has a 'copy' function which allows you to line-up a whole bunch of recordings and play them back sequentially. So I leave it recording overnight onto the HDD of the HS2 and then dump them (edited with no ad breaks etc) onto DVD-R.
You might be able to do something similar with your PC.

Couch Potato

I have a question

Got Sky+ installed and using FTV card in old box.

When moving the FTV card to Sky+ box - it will as expected recognise the card but will not allow me to record anything ...

I assume then that the Sky+ record functionality is tied to box AND card.

Is there anyway to enable the recording etc. features for the FTV card ?

ShaneOC

Originally posted by Couch Potato
I assume then that the Sky+ record functionality is tied to box AND card.

Is there anyway to enable the recording etc. features for the FTV card ?

Yes the recording functionality is tied to the card.

I don't think that there is a way to activate the recording for a FTV card. You could do it in the UK at one stage but it would be complicated here as you obviously would also have recording enabled on your subscription card. It might flag up that you are trying to use a FTV card in Ireland. Better off using a video to record from the FTV card.

watty

I presume that though a Topfield or Humax FTA PVR satellite receiver can record BBC3, BBC4, CBBC, CBEEBIes etc, Stanice 0 etc (Or a PC with Satellite Card), a Sky+ with an Irish Sub can't, even if the BBC added via Other Channels?

Couch Potato

Originally posted by ShaneOC
Yes the recording functionality is tied to the card.

I don't think that there is a way to activate the recording for a FTV card. You could do it in the UK at one stage but it would be complicated here as you obviously would also have recording enabled on your subscription card. It might flag up that you are trying to use a FTV card in Ireland. Better off using a video to record from the FTV card.

Thanks Shane