I have a sky dish. Two cables running from it. I would like a recording box. Any suggestions?
uksatellite@yahoo.co.uk
I bought all my equipment from uk satellite - link as above
Very helpful and responsive, and reasonable prices
Thanks, Philip, but the link doesn’t connect. I try searching uksatelite.
John
Looks like site is down for maintenance. I’ll have a look tomorrow. Thanks again though.
ok - I haven’t used it for a while.
No. But You’ve given me a title so I’ll do some searching. Thank you, much appreciated.
No suggestions as to a particular box but if you have a dish with two cables from the LNB into your house you will probably go for a twin tuner box. Record one channel and watch another, or record two at the same time.
I bought two High gain/Low noise LNB units from this German company https://www.hm-sat-shop.de/en/ their prices are good and they stock a large variety of receiver/recorders from cheap to high spec. British people often recommend Humax boxes because Humax sell lorry loads of their product into the UK Freesat market but there are dozens of manufacturers selling a multitude of products.
Find one with a GUI, (the screens that have the program guide and navigation controls) that you like the look of and seems intuitive to you. You can usually find screen shots on the net of the different control screens that the box uses. Some are very clunky looking or too busy looking. Others keep it simple. By example older Sky boxes have a totally rubbish user interface, the latest are very clean looking. That is the sort of difference that marks out a PVR box from a large paperweight.
For when the hard drive dies (it will eventually) it might be handy to look for one with an easily removable hard drive caddy. Also you can later opt to fit a bigger drive to store more hours of moving wallpaper or a newer spec one with super quiet operation. If you regularly record programming from the HD channels you will fill up a <1TB hard drive fairly quickly if you are away from home or record a lot of telly to check/skim view to judge its quality then bin or keep to watch later.
If you just want to watch/time shift television programmes then keep your purchase simple. Avoid a purchase that has a spec list as long as your arm. There are boxes with Wi-Fi, LAN, Bluetooth,Smart card readers.
One feature which may be of use is a USB and SD card slot. If a friend gives you a USB stick with a film on that he ripped from a DvD (honest guvnor) then most of the Linux based boxes will play the most common file formats, MKV, AVI, mp4, FLV, MOV and the content of your friends thumb drive can be copied onto your storage drive to view again another time.
The very best thing about a PVR, no adverts. If you can find one with a skip forward button with adjustable skip length you can clear an advert break in 4 to 6 button presses in little more that 2 seconds.
Thank you, Ian. I have made contact with them.
Let us know how you get on with your eventual choice John. I am interested to know. My paragraph regarding not requiring a box with lots of input/output specs was probably unnecessary. I was having a browse on the website I listed and most of the PVR products seem to have LAN and just about everything else.
I would be surprised if there is not someone fluent in English available to speak to on the phone. If there is, a chat about what you want might save time and effort on your part.
I do not have a personal recommendation because I use a Windows based box with quad tuner as a dedicated media player/recorder. If I did not use a Windows box I would opt for a Linux based box and be in the market for something similar to your needs.
That is a good idea, Ian. I want a box that records TV programmes. I’m not after some sort of wizardry. I want to make sure the screw connections from the satellite dish are the same as a sky box. Should be simple, n’est pas!