Sky+ Box

[kieron]

From Satcure.co.uk
 
 

Can I fit a larger Hard Drive in my Sky+ Box? Since the Sky+ EPG software update, 5 Aug 2002, the Maxtor D540X 120GB disk no longer holds the recorded program after power on. We don't know how widespread this problem is or whether the next upgrade might fix it. You can have a 120GByte drive installed instead of the old 40, and it works a dream, although there are obviously a few caveats! It seems that the Sky+ box only waits about 8 seconds for the drive to spin up. If the drive isn't ready within 8 seconds of power-up, the operating system assumes that the drive is not present, and continues from there. A "full system reset" will find the drive but, alas, that also wipes the contents! So what you need is a drive that has a fast spin-up time; this is generally mutually exclusive with fast high capacity drives which typically spin at 7200rpm. The Maxtor 4G120J6 drive (which you can get at under 300 GBP) spins up in only 6 seconds (it's 5400rpm) and works. Just install the unformatted drive, turn on and then "prepare" the disk with a full system reset. The Sky+ actually formats on-the-fly. In use, as expected, aproximately 3 times the programming can be stored, and all is well, except for the cosmetic "Free Space" numeric display. Ignore it and all will be well. The bargraph display of free space works well, and that is what the box uses for its own purposes. The drives that are known to work come from the Maxtor D540X family, although the box will crash irrevocably when writing past 128GB (a well known limit in ATAPI drives); so, for the moment at least, the 120GB drive is as big as it gets. You will need a suitable Torx screwdriver (Maplin Electronics) to remove the cover screws. It's a number 9 or 10 - not sure which.

The data recorded to the Sky+ hard disk is essentially the live MPEG2 datastream from the digital satellite feed. There are 3 problems with attempting to read this data directly from the disk. 1. The disk data format (directory and file structures) is not compatible with any commercial (PC) operating system. 2. For all channels except the truly free ones (such as Sky News) the raw datastream is encrypted (scrambled) using the Videoguard encryption system. To decrypt this stream you would need a Videoguard decryption module, only available inside of a Sky Digibox. This would presumably also need a valid Sky card. 3. Many programmes, especially movie channels further add Macrovision protection to the videostream to prevent cross- recording to videotape. Pace (the manufacturers of Sky+) have demonstrated a firewire interface that could slot into the PCMCIA slot behind the rear panel of the Sky+. There are currently no plans to market or sell this device- it was demonstrated to show the potential expansion capabilities of the system. Even if you found a unit lying in a Pace dustbin, it would be useless to you as it would need the software support in the operating system of the Sky+. Should such a device come on the market, then in theory you could stream "permitted" content (i.e. neither encyrypted nor protected) to a firewire-capable PC Your only solution would be to stream the analogue video content (ideally from the SVHS or RGB outputs, as these provide better video quality) from the Sky+ to a suitable video capture card or device on your PC, and then re-compress the data into MPEG form suitable for viewing with your favourite viewer. Although there yould be a loss of quality because of the digital-analoge-video conversion, this should not be especially noticable on a normal TV, if the video capture card is of sufficiently good quality. Sky+ facilitates this process easilly, using the "dump to video" option on recorded programmes, so if you have enough PC harddisk space you can stream a number of programmes, one after the other. I have heard of a people also feeding the analogue signal to a suitable input on (selected!) Digital Video (DV) cameras and then streaming that via firewire to their PC. This is essentially the same as above, with the potential advantage that the firewire interface and supporting software are better suited to handle, format, compress, and potentially edit the incoming stream. Of course, a more convenient solution might be to feed the videostream to a DVD-recorder for permanent offline digital storage on DVD-RW. Unless you already have a reasonable high-end PC suitable for video stream recording, editing abnd playback, this would be a cheaper and more resilient option.

slightly outdated but sill relevant -
 
On a similar but slightly different topic, anybody any experience of the Dreambox and associated stuff - couple of fella's i know swear by this sub sharing melarky over the web - havent read enough about to fully understand it all yet - but seems to work on the principle of a subscription sharing pool between yourself and a group of other genuine subscribers across europe sharing each others subs to gain access to all the european satellite feeds via the web.
 
here's a wikipedia definition which seems accurate enough for a change
 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreambox
 
K
 
 

[Snoop55]

I've been using a Dreambox since they first came out and up to about six months ago it was definitely the dogs whatsits.  New encryption techniques have tamed it somewhat now and to get any reasonable use out of it will require some sort of third party card sharing system.
 
A cheaper alternative is the Nano 9600 IP which although has few bells and whistles does open up a world of satellite television which hasn't been available for years on the Dreambox.  If you take a look at this webpage it lists the currently active decodable channels via this unit.
 

[Stephen]

Surely you would need your dish on a rotator (or a number of dishes) to get the multiple satelitte transmissions.

[Snoop55]

I have an 80cm dish with a dual LNB pointing to Astra at 19.2 and Hotbird at 13 providing access to most of the European stuff.  For the harder to receive stuff I use a 2M dish with an actuator and finally the standard Sky setup at 28.2

[Si]

wow...
 
isn't 200+ channels on Sky enough for you guys?  Where do you find the time to watch all this stuff?

[Telone]

Also a lot of nights I find myself saying 200+ channels and nothing to watch 

[Snoop55]

I really use it for watching football.  Although I have Sky Sports they just don't show enough of the matches I want to see.  With the help of this website there is not a great deal which is missed.

[casper]

I have an 80cm dish with a dual LNB pointing to Astra at 19.2 and Hotbird at 13 providing access to most of the European stuff.  For the harder to receive stuff I use a 2M dish with an actuator and finally the standard Sky setup at 28.2

Mission control - now I see the thinking behind your username and avatar

[Gerard]

if you buy that box do you not need a sky card to get them channels?