Page 1 of Whats the freeview alternative to Sky+

So my finances are being reviewed at the moment and I may have to give up my beloved Sky+ in favour of a freeview alternative - however having lived with sky digital since it was launched I cant imagine any other alternative being so good particularly the EPG.

the majority of stuff we watch is on E4 anyway so can anyone recommend a decent freeview PVR type jobby? Would i be able to simply plug it onto my sky dish (as a digital antena?) or does it get quite complicated?

Thanks in advance

________________________________________________
Companies that have p**sed me off so much that I will never use them again and I hope you dont either....
Alloy Bodies of Manchester - The Grand Daddy & Benchmark for shockingly poor customer service.
Capital Bank Leasing who are part of BOS & are f**ing useless & struggle to action the smallest request but are fantastically efficient at taking money out of my account
Orange Telecom
....more coming soon no doubt.....

The normal Freeview is through your TV ariel. You may need a wideband ariel, you`ll only find out if some channels are missing after installing the system. I have a `Digifusion` PVR. This is (to my knowledge) the only one with 2 weeks EPG. I`ve had it almost a year & it`s crashed about twice in that time, otherwise it`s been very reliable.It has an 80 gig hard drive, we use ours a lot & we`ve never come close to filling it, even after a 10 day holiday. It can record 2 programmes at the same time & it is possible to watch a programme already recorded at the same time.The Digifusion cost us about £179-00 but I`ve seen them cheaper since. There are several freeview pvr`s some good some not so. Digital SPY & the A/V forums have good advice on them.

Is there anyway of keeping (or buying) the Sky+ hardware but ditching (or turning down) the subscriptions to view only the `Freesat` channels?

This item was edited on Saturday, 21st January 2006, 17:01

Humax PVR9200T Set Top Box - got this just after christmas and been really pleased with it

There are people more knowledgeable than me about SKY+ on here but I believe you have to pay a £10-00 a month to keep it going. One reason I havn`t gone for SKY +.

It is possible to have a Sky+ box and only pay £10 a month to access the Freesat channels on Sky and have Sky+ functionality but it`s not easy.

Take a look at this website:
http://www.freesatfromsky.co.uk

You can get a card from them for £20 then if you have a Sky+ box you need to contact Sky customer services and badger them for a while to let you have the Sky+ recording features activated for the £10 a month subscription.

It`s worth checking out the channel list on the Freesat service - it doesn`t have things like E4 so it may be better going the Freeview PVR route. The best one around at the moment is probably the Topfield 5800 - it gets consistently good reviews and it`s easy to copy recorded shows onto your PC via its USB port. It has a 160Gb drive and can happily dual record while playing back another recording:
http://www.turbosat.com/acatalog/Topfield.html

Hope this helps!

Quote:
Humax PVR9200T Set Top Box - got this just after christmas and been really pleased with it

Yes this is regarded as one of the best Freeview PVRs at the moment - I have the older 8000 model and will soon be upgrading to the 9200. Incidentally this 9200 effectively has three tuners meaning you can record two programmes while watching a third - even Sky+ cant do this. Also you can backup recorded programmes to a PC for DVD burning etc - again something Sky+ lacks.

I can understand the attraction of Freeview, however is Sky Sports available as a Top Up to watch the soccer?

Quote:
It is possible to have a Sky+ box and only pay £10 a month to access the Freesat channels on Sky and have Sky+ functionality but it`s not easy
That`s not subscription free then is it?
Flippin rip off in my opinion - £120 per year to have the same as something that costs nothing on Freeview.

Quote:
I can understand the attraction of Freeview, however is Sky Sports available as a Top Up to watch the soccer?

No - Sky Sports News is available on Freeview as standard and Eurosport is on TopupTV but thats it for Sports channels.