NTL MMDS and HDD DVD

dubray

I recently got NTL MMDS (Dublin area) installed and is working perfectly and purchase a philips HDD/DVD recorder. I went through every possible combination of connection yet the philips hdd fails to detect the tv stations. However i can play and view dvd using it but no TV, only static.

Contacted Philips support centre, which can only be described as abuse over the phone. Their staff are rude, insulting and not very well informed about the market they are "supporting" (rant over)

I also had a techie guy drop round and try for himself and still nothing. He thought it might be a faulty digital tuner so i returned to the Philips shop in Arnotts and he tried to connect to a standard cable and it detected the station. But he did not have NTL digital MMDS to run exact test and basically called me a liar. Complaint letter in the post.

So after all that i got a complete refund and before i purchase another model can anyone tell me if they have NTL MMDS and HDD DVD recorder and experienced the same connection problem and if you did mange to get it working what brand and model can you recommend?

Thanks

Ray

Alun

MMDS is digital only, isn't it? So there'd be no analogue signal for the DVD recorder's tuner to tune into, assuming it only has an analogue TV tuner. And even if it had a digital tuner (DVB-T), it still wouldn't be able to tune into the MMDS signal. ntl: cable carries both analogue and digital signals, so these kind of devices work in a cable area, but not MMDS.

Seems to me like you should have done a bit more research before buying the recorder in the first place.

The tax man

Did you connect the STB to the recorder via scart lead??
That's the only way you'll get NTL on the recorder.
The digital turner won't pick up the NTL signal. Does it also have an analogue turner?
What type STB do you have and what way were you connecting things up,rf leads or scart leads.






*edit* slow typing Alun beat me to it.

dubray

Cheers Alun,

forgive my ignorance but I'm not TV expert and i would have assumed the "professional" in Philips should have informed me of this.

The model was
Philips Hard Disk/DVD Recorder 250 GB DVDR3460H/05

I followed all instructions for connection via a decorder box.

So you saying it not possible to have any HDD DVD recorder with NTL MMDS?

I tried every possible combination using scarts and RF cable

Alun

According to the website, it only has an analogue tuner, so needs a plain ordinary analogue UHF/VHF RF input, such as from an ordinary (non-MMDS) TV aerial or an analogue cable connection.

The only way you'd ever be able to record anything on it would be to connect the SCART output on the MMDS box to the SCART input on the DVD recorder, and record whatever the MMDS box was tuned into at the time, but not record a different channel. You'd have to select the external source that the MMDS box was connected to as the input on the DVD recorder to make this work.

For people with ntl: cable, things are a little better in as much as ntl: still transmit a basic analogue set of channels in parallel with the digital signal, so at least we can tune our VCR's or DVD recorders to these channels, albeit in a lesser quality, but if we want to record a program that is on one of the digital only channels, the only way is to select that channel on the cable box, and record via the SCART connection.

dubray

cheer Alun

If only the Philips support could have explained that it would have saved a lot of bother

Alun

dubray wrote:

cheer Alun

If only the Philips support could have explained that it would have saved a lot of bother

If they weren't in Ireland, they might not be aware of the whole MMDS 'thing' which is unique to Ireland AFAIK.

dubray

Alun wrote:

If they weren't in Ireland, they might not be aware of the whole MMDS 'thing' which is unique to Ireland AFAIK.

typical i contacted Support for Ireland and ended up talking to support in india

watty

It's just the same as Digital only cable. In Philips' home country the terrestrial is Digital only and the cable mostly digital.

Digital MMDS has been available world wide almost since Irish MMDS started. There's nothing uniquely Irish about MMDS, except that the original Chorus decoders were for US cable NTSC and are terrible quality

Alun

watty wrote:

It's just the same as Digital only cable. In Philips' home country the terrestrial is Digital only and the cable mostly digital.

Digital MMDS has been available world wide almost since Irish MMDS started. There's nothing uniquely Irish about MMDS, except that the original Chorus decoders were for US cable NTSC and are terrible quality

Fair enough .. I'd never heard of it until I arrived on these shores though.