Another FreeSat query

[gareth evans]

If there are Sky broadcasts which are free to air, how do I get my Humax box to tune to them?

[alan_m]

Possibly there is a non-freesat mode in you box's menu.

Similar to

I've only had a very early Freesat HD box and on that box it was either the Freesat channels with the full 7 day EPG OR all the other free to air channels with only a now/next EPG.

[Martin Brown]

I don't know about on a Humax box but on mine the choices it offers are Freesat or "Other satellite". Both are in the beam so you can watch anything that isn't encrypted or presumably buy a Sky decoder card.

It is on the tuner menu - mine offers Analogue/TDTV/Freesat/Other (analogue is no longer at all useful)

[SH]

Analogue is still useful for those who feed CCTV cameras around the house to all the TVs....

(DVB-T modulators are expensive compared to their analogue counterparts, and I have 10 CCTV channels... :-) )

[Andy Burns]

and possibly the box will be very user *un* friendly in non-freesat mode compared to freesat mode, no EPG and you might have to enter frequency, polarisation, modulation type etc for what you want to watch ..

[tim...]

there are no *Sky* FTA broadcasts that aren't also available via Freesat

there may be some non-Sky FTA broadcasts that aren't on Freesat

what channels are you considering here?

[tim...]

and no recording option

[alan_m]

And you will probably have to wade through 200 channels of crap to find an extra half dozen you would actually watch at some time. You may be surprised how many American God slot channels there are where you can send a large amount of money to enter heaven or be cured of an illness :)

I have a non-Freesat, non-Sky box (Enigma2 running OpenVix software) where I can receive the Sky free to air (FTA) channels AND get the 7 day EPG for them by various means, including over the air. I tune into their IEPG channel for 5 minutes each day - automated by a configured timer running at 6am each morning. I very much doubt if a similar method would work on a Freesat branded box. However someone with a Freesat box is probably not missing too much with the FTA channels in the Freesat line-up. Sky's popular channels are not FTA.

My Enigma2 box doesn't support seamless catch up TV over the Internet which many of the latest Freesat PVRs do.

[The Natural Philosopher]

I dont recall any of that being an issue when I used it with a PC dongle.

[Steve Walker]

There used to be a very good catch-up add-in for OpenVix - with the advantage that it could save the programmes to your hard-disk too. Unfortunately the developer had a fall-out with a number of people and stopped further work, while forked versions don't seem to keep up with the frequent changes, so it has become almost useless.

[Dave W]

I've just looked on my Humax, and the only free-to-air non-Freesat Sky News is Sky News Arabia.

[alan_m]

There may be some confusion here about what a Freesat box and A.N Other box is capable of supporting.

Freesat is basically a 7 day EPG for the programs carried on that platform. Sky also has a 7 day EPG for all the Free to Air programs that they carry (and can be found on a Sky box).

If I scan my box for Freesat channels I get around 180 channels with the full over the air 7 day EPG

If I do the same for the FTA channels carried on Sky (and for which they supply a 7 day EPG) I get around 260 channels.

This is a difference of 80 channels. A Freesat branded box can still be tuned to these 80 channels but the EPG will/may be limited to displaying the information for the current and next program. On my box the software is capable of displaying the full 7 day EPG for all 80 of these channels.

Note: The numbers above are with no filtering. I normally use filters for scanning so I don't see certain channels (shopping, god, etc.). In reality I usually just use my favourites list which is a sub-set of the full scan and only contains 40 channels and even then some of these channels I rarely watch.