I have two TVs. The Sony, I just told it “retune all digital channels” and “Bing!” it’s up and running.
Told the Sharp TV to do the same, and it’s completed the process, says it’s found everything, but… the EPG fills in, if I select a channel it tells me what is on now, and I can hear it, but it comes up “video format unsupported”.
It’s not that old a TV, it is HD capable, I have a UK sat box and a BluRay player attached to it’s HDMI inputs,
Anyone seen similar?
Off to see if I can find a firmware upgrade for it…
Is it French digital TV you are tuning in to using UK TV’s?
If so I believe you need a TV that can ‘interpret’ SECAM not PAL as in UK.
Newer TVs may have the ability to tune into PAL and SECAM but a UK TV that is a couple of years old may not be able to.
Apologies if I’ve mis-read the question.
You are a long time out of date Tim. The PAL and SECAM sets disappeared a long time ago. A more obvious problem would be that French TNT transmissions switched to digital fairly recently and many older, even HD ready sets, did not have compatible tuners. I’m not sure that this can be the problem here as the TV has located the stations even if it won’t play them. It might be worth trying an up to date TNT box to receive the programmes as they work through the AV input on older TVs.
This is a 2011 vintage set (at least, that’s the firmware date, I think we bought it in '13) and is fully digital, HD, 1024p, etc. etc. and works fine in the UK, worked fine in france for digital terrestrail TV last year. France changed their DTT standard in some way recently (I think they switched to MPEG4 instead of MPEG2 - but it’s hard to find out!) and now the TV won’t play ball.
Sharp support have trotted out an electronic shrug, basically saying it’s a UK spec set and they can’t vouch for it working in any other country, despite “what country are you in” being part of the basic setup. They say there’s no firmware update for it. I think it’s a cheap badge-engineerd set they knocked out as a cheap deal one Xmas, and never had any ongoing support after that. Pity - picture quality is fine from BluRay or Astra (UK) Freesat decoder.
Our other telly is a Sony of even older vintage, and it was utterly fine! All we had to do to “adapt” it to the change was tell it to re-tune all the digital chans, took five mins, and BING, french daytime soaps in full HD. OK, now I come to think of it, why do I even want this TV to pick up french telly… Ah, tomorrow’s Clermont match!
I have a six or seven year old Sony that picks up the HD TNT programmes fine although it needed retuning after the changeover last year. I also have a slightly older Samsung TV that cannot pick up French TNT through its own tuner but does do quite happily using a cheap (less than €20) TNT box bought from a local supermarket.
Thanks David. Problem with an external box is, we’re out of inputs! 