Digital TV switchover

[Bill]

Am I being stupid?

We need to find a box to update an old relative to digital TV. Urgently.

I tried an old OnDigital box I had. It worked for about 2 channel changes, then froze.

Went out and bought new low-end Sagem box. It worked for about 2 minutes, then froze. Returned it, and got another one. This does the same. Tried via 2 scart TV's, same on both. Symptoms are it finds all the channels, can select channels, then suddenly it stays on last selected channel and sound disappears. Have to unplug from mains to get control back for the next 2 mins.

Do I have to keep returning these till one works?

[Ash]

Where in the world are you Bill ?

[Jason]

sounds like it may be a poor signal area!!

[Ash]

I was thinking along the same lines and also that digibox box is probably receiving updates via the digital signal and it's this which is 'locking' the boxes up. Maybe best if Bill takes the box back and gets the shop to plug the thing in and see if it works properly.

[Andrew Gabriel]

Is old relative going to cope with two remotes, different tuning scheme, some functions on one, some on the other? I've seen this really confuse not-so-elderly.

You may be better off with a new TV with digital tuner.

[Andy Champ]

New digital standard coming out imminently. You won't be able to get all the channels in some areas in the new year, and in most areas come

2012. Try explaining that to the elderly.

Andy

[OG]

As others have suggested, try an alternative aerial. The Telecam TCE2001 is highly recommended as an indoor one. I was going to say, £20 from Argos - but I've jsut checked and they're down to £8

[Simon C.]

May not be the case now but the Sagem boxes did seem to have a habit of freezing. Had one myself, and a mate, and reading the Argos reviews. While ago now tho.

[Bill]

In message , Andrew Gabriel writes

Old relative was offered age-related deal for the North Welsh changeover, talked to "the lady" and they rightly agreed that she was on Winter Hill. Said they would be back in touch with her. They haven't, and now W Hill is 2 days away.

She was going to accept the offer of a new Panasonic TV plus a nice man to check her (known dodgy) aerial and fix it, all as part of the scheme for the over( mustn't mention here age)'s. Seemed a good price to me if aerial work is needed.

SWMBO here has decreed we have to be ready for when she suddenly loses BBC2 on Wednesday. Hence the panic.

Our aerial is fine, and I've also tried with a different aerial. These Sagem boxes do seem to pick up Welsh TV from the back of the aerial and insert that as BBC1 Wales etc. I presume this is because Moel-y-Parc has upped its power with its earlier changeover.

It just seems odd that 3 boxes all do this freezing, yet our main TV, video and the upstairs thing with a Maplin PVR feeding the ancient TV off a set top aerial all work fine.

[Bill]

Quick further question in view of previous replies, and yes I know I'd be better in a uk tv group, but...

I suppose it's possible that when the Sagem box scans, it picks up the now enhanced BBC Wales off the back of the aerial before it gets to the Winter Hill channels. It does announce the channels as BBC1Wales etc.

I try not to get bogged down in how this new-fangled TV works, but is it possible that the box is getting confusing update commands from the different regions?

I think it's back to Currys yet again in the morning, though.

[The Natural Philosopher]

I've been very satisfied with Sony STB's. I bought three on Ebay. One is a bit flaky, but the other two are fine.

[The Natural Philosopher]

I generally find that you end up with tow channels of everything, and one doesn't work that well.

[John Rumm]

Don't think so...

That may be understandable. The old on dodgy boxes don't understand the encoding scheme used on some channels now (which is to be used on all of them after switchover)

TVs/SCARTS are unlikely to make any difference in this case.

Boxes can freeze on a poor signal - however, that is usually just the channel freezing or pixelating or stopping and starting. The box itself should not crash or lock up, and you should be able to tune away to other channels.

That sounds like either a faulty box, or you have found one that is buggy enough to actually crash in the presence of too many decoding errors.

Buy a different brand of box and see how you get on. Pop to somewhere like maplin and buy an inline 6dB attenuator and put that in the aerial lead before doing a tune. That should prevent it attempting to tune very weak fringe reception channels[1]. If you get perfect reception with the attenuator there that is also a good indication that you have a bit of headroom in your signal to cope with normal signal variation. (obviously take the attenuator out once its all tuned and running)

[1] another trick is to look up the range of channels used by your transmitter. When tuning, pull the aerial lead out when outside of that range - that will also drop many duplicated / weak channels.

[Bill]

The reason I suspected they might was that some research on the net seemed to suggest all sorts of weird things like usb serial data on scarts on some boxes. Doesn't seem to be the case here though.

The only button that does anything in the fault condition is the 'hold for 5 secs' reset button on the box itself.

Ok, I thought I'd try the unplug aerial during tuning trick, but that didn't help. Further research seems to show that, unknown to me, a relay transmitter for BBC Wales, "Storeton Wales", has popped up almost in line with Winter Hill, 500watts but only about 3 miles away. It used to just relay WH in the opposite direction. I suspect that this is where I'm getting BBC 1 Wales from. It's on Channel 57, Winter Hill is Ch 56.

Have rung Currys prior to the next visit. Yesterday they said no-one else had returned any of these boxes. Today they say that for the duration of the changeover there is chaos and everyone will be having similar problems. They will return the money when I take it back.

I can't really believe that these boxes have firmware that can be crashed by incoming signals. I've built crystal sets that work better than this.

[John Rumm]

That sounds like a complete box decoder crash rather than what one would expect. I would definitely go for a different box. With a bad signal it may pixelate, freeze, give strange pictures, and squeeks and clicks etc, but the who user interface should not stop responding.

Manually deleting the unwanted channels (based on actual channel number rather than ident) can sometimes help boxes that get confused.

Well, when you look at the price the things are sold for... Still I don't recall many that actually lock up. I have got one bit of PC decoding software for a DTT card that will crash in the presense of too many errors though.

(And to be fair, your crystal set was probably not decoding the AM using a DSP, while unpicking FEC, Convolutional codes, interleave buffers, running inverse DCTs and demuxing multiple video streams)

[Bill]

In message , John Rumm writes

I can't resist saying "Ah but neither are these digiboxes".

I have returned the box for cash in hand. My query about how, if none of their other boxes would work any better, they would be able to sell any TV's at the moment didn't draw any response.

I've had another go with the old OnDigital Nokia box - still locks up after a few minutes. I then remembered I had a DVB-T device for the laptop. That works fine, just like the TV's here. Old relative won't have a computer in the house, though, so that's out, but at least I can make something work. It sees both the Wales BBC relay and the Winter Hill service so I can choose between them and set it up manually, unlike these 'clever' set-top boxes.

I'm beginning to think it is better if she does lose BBC2 for a month to trigger her back into the 'assisted' subsidised set plus aerial route.

[Peter Crosland]

The OnDigital box will not work. Can your relative cope with two remotes that a separtae box requires? Do the decent thing and buy them a new set.

Peter Crosland

[John Rumm]

Well, ok, yours weren't - for long anyway ;-)

The Ondigi box will have trouble with the 8K COFDFM used on the ITV channels (although may work on the 2K BBC ones). IIUC the whole network switches to 8K at DSO. There is also another problem with so called "split NIT" operation. Again older boxes that don't quite match the spec can fail here (this is not usually a crash causing event - but it would break the EPG)

Either that, or see if one of the more upmarket boxes (or perhaps a PVR even) will fare better. It would be interesting to see what happens on a more robust box - to at least gauge the overall signal quality. However from your experiments so far it does not sound promising.

(IME marginal YV aerial systems are very hard to get right without test equipment - otherwise you are working in the dark and ca end up guessing in completely wrong directions)