Advice TV providers - how do you do it?

[Bodhi]

Still small arse compared to a tablet.

Which is still tiny compared to a decent TV.

 

[georgie]

I'm not sure where Job could plug one of them in on top of a mountain.

 

[Hawkwind]

Only time I watch Tv on a tablet (Nvdia thing) is on short haul flights that have no IFE or shit IFE.

At home we have a 55" on the wall and either local telco provided western TV, stream TV (Hulu, Filmon...) or torrent download played through Kodi (Android media box). Also can stream from Synology NAS over WiFi to TV/mobile devices.

 

[old.user4556]

Bit of an update:

Now TV - really very decent, can get the app for your phone and cast channels to the Chromecast when required. App is slick, casting is fast as usual. Few drawbacks - Sky have crippled it so it's only 720p (still, tbh it's good, as Sky's HD is 1080i only I believe) and there is no 5.1 feed on the movies or Sky premium channels. Also, not all content is 720p, some of it looks like SD which isn't great. Compression is low for the good channels, so it's perfectly fine even on my 65". For £6.99 per month for a fair chunk of Sky, hard to complain with the option of Sky Sports PAYG for days / weekends.

I'm going to try negotiating with Sky again. The image quality on the HD channels is still way better than Freesat with streaming content from major providers baked directly into the software / planner of the Sky box, so I think i'd take bad going to a basic Freesat setup. They've also ironed out their dispute with Discovery, so can keep my Eurosport. I want to give it another year see how the next gen 4k units pan out - the Roku 4 isn't out here yet and I suspect that the 5th gen Apple TV will get a 4k upgrade.

 

[caLLous]

I'm not sure Sky HD is 1080i only - there's an option to change it to 720p if you're only using an HD "ready" (ie 720p) TV. I don't know if it receives a different stream or downsamples (although you think it could do the latter on its own).

 

[Raven]

Sky HD is a bag of bollocks whatever they claim to transmit. If you compare a film from their store to a download from the high seas, the download is leagues ahead.

They are also slow as fuck to download. I was trying to watch the latest star Trek the other day, after an hour or so downloading it said "ready to watch" the picture quality was crap and it kept stopping due to not being fully downloaded. I gave up and got a decent copy in around 10 minutes from a torrent. The box is cable connected to 75mb broadband and still takes forever to download.

Before I put a PC under the TV I would occasionally watch a film on the Sky box with the wife, usually stuff I had already seen on the PC, picture quality is always worse on Sky HD, same with sports...a decent HD stream is always better than Sky's output.

 

[old.user4556]

Sky HD is a bag of bollocks whatever they claim to transmit. If you compare a film from their store to a download from the high seas, the download is leagues ahead.

The store and transmitted content will definitely vary in bit rate, I've not downloaded anything from Sky Cinema so I can't comment. It's the transmitted HD I'm referring to specifically.

 

[Bodhi]

Sky HD is a bag of bollocks whatever they claim to transmit. If you compare a film from their store to a download from the high seas, the download is leagues ahead.

They are also slow as fuck to download. I was trying to watch the latest star Trek the other day, after an hour or so downloading it said "ready to watch" the picture quality was crap and it kept stopping due to not being fully downloaded. I gave up and got a decent copy in around 10 minutes from a torrent. The box is cable connected to 75mb broadband and still takes forever to download.

Before I put a PC under the TV I would occasionally watch a film on the Sky box with the wife, usually stuff I had already seen on the PC, picture quality is always worse on Sky HD, same with sports...a decent HD stream is always better than Sky's output.

Not really had an issue on Cinema or Sports, picture quality on both is more than acceptable, and normally the time elapsed between hitting Select and the download being Available is in seconds, so I'm going for user error on that one. Ofc Bluray looks better, but not enough to have me rushing upstairs to naviagte the high seas.

Even the box in the bedroom hooked up via WiFi lets us watch stuff in HD pretty much instantly.

 

[Raven]

acceptable ≠ proper HD (not that many torrents are really HD) I don't do "acceptable"

There is no user error. The sky box is plugged directly into the BT router which is plugged directly into the modem...and torrent/direct downloads are demonstrably better quality on the same screen than sky...and don't cost £5.49 for wanky quality.

I wouldn't know about Sky cinema, I don't really see the point to it, appears to just be old films for more money than Netflix that you can't watch when you feel like it.

Sky are pretty much old hat now anyway, all they offer is the same as everyone else for more money. The quality and service just isn't good enough to warrant the £100 or whatever a month.

 

[old.user4556]

acceptable ≠ proper HD (not that many torrents are really HD) I don't do "acceptable"

There is no user error. The sky box is plugged directly into the BT router which is plugged directly into the modem...and torrent/direct downloads are demonstrably better quality on the same screen than sky...and don't cost £5.49 for wanky quality.

Well your mileage may vary and it does depend on your expectations - it's not wanky, but it's not blu-ray. I do agree re the price - they either need to bring it down, or up the quality. Perhaps this is a different discussion, but streaming is most certainly the future and I just hope that it's not a future of "reduced quality, increased price".

A 1080p rip is always going to be the best. Maybe blu-ray and CD quality audio will be a specialist purchase with MP3 and overpriced, reduced quality vid-streams will dominate the middle ground due to ease.

 

[caLLous]

It's obviously not Blu-ray and obviously not comparable to HD torrents which are either ripped from Blu-ray or from services like iTunes where the file is actually downloaded and encoded rather than streamed and therefore the source material is of much higher quality. It's not like the torrent rippers are sitting there recording these shows/movies off of their sky boxes. This can be the case for HDTV shows but all of the WEB-DL rippers get their source material straight from Netflix/Amazon/iTunes/etc servers and then go from there.

I've never had a problem with HD sports on Sky and it's pretty much all I use it for.

 

[Zarjazz]

It's not like the torrent rippers are sitting there recording these torrents off of their sky boxes.

Actually they do. That's the difference between all the HDTV / WEB-DL / BluRay tags. Low Quality -> Higher Quality

 

[caLLous]

Yeah I snuck in a sneaky edit. I only go for WEB-DL for TV shows nowadays (assuming it's available which it is 99% of the time).

 

[old.user4556]

TV shows in "not blu-ray" quality are fine for me, it's the "price / quality" disparity that pisses me off and hence why I see everything I can at the cinema with the occasional blu-ray purchase for stuff I really like. My missus pays for Netflix, and to be fair, some of their movies are actually very nice with a 5.1 feed.

 

[old.user4556]

By the way, if anyone would care to send me a PM with a guide on anonymous torrenting and a good place to get said good torrents, i'd forever suck your cock THANKS.

 

[Moriath]

By the way, if anyone would care to send me a PM with a guide on anonymous torrenting and a good place to get said good torrents, i'd forever suck your cock THANKS.

Well i still use the bay of pirates. Donno about anyone else.

If you want to anonymous it you could use tor.

 

[caLLous]

I'd use a good VPN service over Tor for transferring data on a large scale. I personally use a seedbox and download from that. It's much easier to keep up good ratios on private trackers with a seedbox. You don't have to tie your home connection up seeding, for one thing. If you're just using public trackers and don't care about seeding or don't need to follow rules about seeding then that's obviously not a concern.

 

[Anastasia]

I got so fed up with VM's appalling Tivo box that I signed for Sky Q last year. It's a big improvement (would not have been difficult) but mighty expensive. I've never been a Sky customer before so signed up for everything, Q silver, movies, sport, box sets, fibre BB and phone. Yours for the bargain, low low, never to be repeated, offer of a lifetime price of £130 / month. I'll wear that for a few months more but will probably ditch movies & sport. The Sky Q thing is quite good - proper multi-room streaming and the mini boxes act as wireless extenders (apparently). I haven't noticed any difference in BB other than on speedtest.net - VM said 150MB/s downstream, Sky says 40. Everything looks / plays the same. It's just too expensive, probably double what it should be (like I know what the operating costs are ). Freeview and BT BB are likely replacements with Lovefilm / Amazon Prime for movies.

 

[Moriath]

What was wrong with tivo?

Mine works perfectly

Its not the competition of the Q box tho thats the vm 6 box that has just launched that does all the streaming stuff.

 

[MYstIC G]

Freeview with a plex pass server and a hdhomerun unit. Records to my NAS which then gets casted to dumb panels via chromecast / firetv depending on which room.

 

[Anastasia]

I found the Tivo user interface to be unbearably slow. Just traversing the channel list was click, wait, click, wait, click, wait. Launching apps on it, like iPlayer was a joke, I could literally (as in NOT figuratively) go and brew up while iPlayer loaded. Without doubt the worst ever software I have used in any situation, ever ever ever. Whoever was responsible for the VM implemetation of the Tivo UI needs a good hard shagging with a rusty spoon. I put up with it for a couple of years, because it did at least function, and the alternatives were build your own PVR or twin tuner only, but eventually the water torture of the UI dripping away on my forehead did me in.

 

[Syri]

I have a fire tv stick (got the student prime deal) and also use netflix and kodi installed on it. Seems to get me enough to watch, and doesn't cost much.

 

[Moriath]

I found the Tivo user interface to be unbearably slow. Just traversing the channel list was click, wait, click, wait, click, wait. Launching apps on it, like iPlayer was a joke, I could literally (as in NOT figuratively) go and brew up while iPlayer loaded. Without doubt the worst ever software I have used in any situation, ever ever ever. Whoever was responsible for the VM implemetation of the Tivo UI needs a good hard shagging with a rusty spoon. I put up with it for a couple of years, because it did at least function, and the alternatives were build your own PVR or twin tuner only, but eventually the water torture of the UI dripping away on my forehead did me in.

Didnt notice being that slow. But i agree its not speedy but i rarely use apps through the tivo box

 

[Bodhi]

As a random aside, I've just discovered that if you have an Android TV you can install Kodi directly on it, with no need for extra boxes etc.

Interesting

 

[Exioce]

It's 2017 and Sky still think HD is some sort of exclusive luxury they can charge top dollar for. Tell them where to go.

 

[Anastasia]

Why bother? Always found kodi to be more effort than worth. Fiddly setup, unreliable streams. Netflix / Amazon will surely kill it off soon.

 

[Anastasia]

It's 2017 and Sky still think HD is some sort of exclusive luxury they can charge top dollar for. Tell them where to go.

Agreed, where can you even buy a SD TV these days?

 

[old.user4556]

It's 2017 and Sky still think HD is some sort of exclusive luxury they can charge top dollar for. Tell them where to go.

Absolutely, and charge for 4k content when there's scraping the barrel currently.

 

[Scouse]

Genuinely interesting ten minutes. And if it's not a persuasive argument to never pay for telly again I don't know what is


View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8Dd5aVXLCc

 

[Job]

I think its his detachment from the subjects that hit me most, talking on stage like the public were lab rats.
If we hit them just here, we get a good squeal return.
Nothing new, I'm sure they ate monitoring torrents and streaming just the same.