ALDI HD Sat receiver - Freesat? + USB record

championc wrote: »

Forgive my ignorance but does a proper Freesat box give you much more than a general non-Sky satellite receiver ?
C

Yes - it doesn't give you any more channels, but it does give a couple of advantages:

1/ you get the EPG - Electronic Program Guide - so you can see up to a week ahead. On the pure FTA boxes you can only see "now and next".

2/ You get the channels in a more reasonable order than you would with an old Sky box or with a FTA box that does not allow you to juggle channel positions. On a Freeview box you get 101 BBC1, 102 BBC2, 103 ITV etc. - then it jumps to 200 BBC News, 201 Parliament....

The Red Button feature which gives you say 8 news "channels" on BBC News or sometimes a "catch-up" channel probably would not be on a basic FTA box

However the Freesat boxes (I think) don't allow you to jumble channels around, or to delete any (not sure about this).

Freesat boxes do allow you to receive some non-Freesat channels like Sky News, RTE Radio and so on but they end up in an "Extra Channels" location, separate menu and only "now and next" programme details.

Freesat boxes have one "feature" that may be a bummer - they do not have UHF outputs - only SCART (and I guess HDMI for HD boxes?)
Hope that helps.
There's a lot of discussion here and on the Sat forum on boards.ie about Freesat boxes.