Technical Section page 18

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This page contains information from Sky+ users. As I don't personally have access to a Sky+ system, I can't answer questions about anything on this page that specifically relates to SKY+. However, I welcome any additional information. Please also look at the Sky+ site link near the bottom of this page. CONTENTS for SKY+ page What will it cost? What do I need? Twin Cable Only one cable available Sky cards Fit larger Hard Drive Bad weather Customer notes LNB installation page Can I copy data from the Hard Drive? What's the best Sky+ box / which model do I have?

What will it cost? Q. I want to be able to record Free To Air programmes (or Free To View) but I don't want a Sky subscription. Can I do this? A. Yes, you will have to pay Sky £10 per month for the pleasure. Most Sky operators don't even know this is an option so you will probably need to ask to speak to a supervisor. (Latest news is that the only way to do this is to subscribe to the minimum package then cancel within your "cooling off" period but insist that you still want to pay £10 a month for the recording facility). What do I need? Apart from the Sky+ Digibox, you will need two cables from a dish fitted with a twin-output LNB* (minimum) or a quad-output LNB or an 8-output OCTO LNB* or two feeds from an apartment distribution system. You will need a Sky subscription and, dependent on the Sky package, you may have to pay an additional £10 per month for the recording facility. *These LNBs are not available for a Sky minidish. You will need to buy a different dish. See our catalogue pages. (Quad-output LNBs are available for a minidish - see our LNB pages). I have a caravan and about to purchase a satellite dish. I have Sky+ at home. Can I use my SKY+ digibox in conjunction with a portable dish? You can use it with any correctly aligned dish that is fitted with a universal LNB having two or more outputs (for full functionality - but see below). Twin Cable I wish to upgrade from Sky Digital to Sky+, and I understand that two coax cables are required to run from the dish to the receiver. I believe that my current cable is CT100, does this need to be replaced with two CT63 spec. cables, or can this remain and a CT63 spec. cable run alongside ? Someone told me that CT63 is expensive crap. Regards John. CT63 "shotgun" twin cable is made to the same high standards as CT100. However it has higher losses than CT100 or H109/WC100 so we recommend that you do not use it for a distance greater than 20 metres, unless you increase your dish size to compensate. It is not expensive if you bear in mind that it is TWIN cable and compare it with WC100 of twice the length. The main reason for using CT63 is that it is narrower and will fit through an existing 10mm diameter hole in the wall. It can also be held to the wall with single 9mm clips, resulting (usually) in a neater installation with less weight hanging from the LNB (See page 10). Apart from the length consideration, it doesn't matter whether you use CT63, H109/WC100 or both. You can also use these cable types for a single input Digibox, for Freeview terrestrial, analogue terrestrial and most security camera systems. If you are wiring a new house I recommend you run at least FOUR cables to each room - and even this may not be enough! Don't forget to take into account security cameras, piping TV to and from a loft distribution system, computer TV card requirements, Freeview terrestrial, doorbells (we have two - one for our children so we don't have to answer the door to their friends every ten minutes!) and telephone systems. Also don't forget you might want a local computer network one day. Then there's the consideration that you might want to pipe stereo sound to various rooms. That's two more shielded cables. CT63 is ideal for that and you can ignore the high frequency losses because they are negligible at audio frequencies. Use whatever length you need. See the cable page of our catalogue for details. How is the LNB input selected? At power up, input 1 will be used for live viewing, and input 2 for recording. However if the recording is for the currently viewed channel, input 1 will be used. Switching channel during the recording will therefore result in input 2 being used for live viewing. In this situation the use of the inputs is reversed. The Digibox will never change input in the middle of either a recording or viewing from any particular channel.

Only One Cable It's impossible for me to run two cables from my dish as I live in an apartment. I've heard about this "stacker" system. Can I use it with my existing cable? The best solution is for the management company to provide you with two feeds from the distribution system. This costs typically £150 per apartment and probably a minimum of 16 apartments to make it viable to do the work. There's a device called a "stacker-destacker system" which will do what you want. But you'd still need permission from the management company to install it. Another version of the stacker system is available for use in an ordinary house but the best solution is still two cables. http://www.johansson.be/htmen/stackerdestacker.php?ref=9633KIT%20UK A SKY+ Digibox will sort-of work if you fit an LNB switch. You select input 1 if you want to watch and input 2 if you want to record. It's not a very satisfactory solution. You can use a "splitter" but this is very restrictive since you can only watch and record at the same time if the programmes are of the same frequency band and polarisation. It could also damage the Digibox if the wrong type of splitter is fitted. CLICK HERE for info. Also see: http://www.satcure.co.uk/digifaq2.htm#split and http://forum.digitalspy.co.uk/board/showthread.php?t=357300

I do have my original SKY digibox. Can this be used with my existing SKY+ card? If not what cards are available to me and where can I obtain them from? You can use any Sky card in any Sky Digibox but it will be limited to non-premium channels only unless you ask Sky to activate it in that Digibox. (They will do this but, if you want to swap between home and caravan, don't do it too often because it goes on your computer record at Sky and they will refuse). Sky cards are available from Sky. Sky+ saves the "transport stream" (data received) as is with its original encryption. You have to have a Sky card inserted in order to watch recorded programmes. This has a number of interesting side effects not least of which is that very old programs will not play back (because the card no longer holds the keys to decode them).   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.

Well over six months ago I installed a Maxtor A/V 200 gig hard drive into my skyplus box. It works very well and is used a lot daily! - Peter

Did you know...

In bad weather when you lose the signal your SKY+ Digibox will NOT play recorded programmes?

You'll have NOTHING to watch.

LOTS of information about SKY+ on this site:
http://www.morlocks.co.uk/

Information about SKY+ here:
http://www.wiredhomeguide.co.uk

Info on Hard Drive upgrades here:
http://forum.digitalspy.co.uk/board/showthread.php?t=30514

 

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Hi Martin,

an update (and solution):

The software supplied by the hard drive manufacturer (Maxtor PowerMax software) has confirmed that my original Sky+ hard drive is dead. The drive position at the opposite end of the receiver to the fan, coupled with the metal enclosure it's held in, result in a hard drive that runs very hot for most of the time, (V2 Sky+ receivers do not have the metal top plate to hold them in place and hence this is less of an issue). I have bought a new Maxtor hard drive, which has an 80GB capacity and "Fluid Dynamic Bearings" which are supposed to cope with the heat better. I have also left the metal cover off the HD enclosure, and used elastic bands to hold it in place with the lower enclosure only. So far so good. The Sky+ software had no problems formatting the drive following a master reset, and no apparent problems with the additional capacity.

The instructions for doing the upgrade are on www.hummer.co.uk including tested drives. Various forums are available on www.digitalspy.co.uk including discussions on drives tested and experiences etc.

The new hard drive cost £40, which was simple to install and has double the recording time of the original drive - so pretty happy with the result!

Thanks for your help and I hope this info is of use to others.

Regards

Max

I am interested in getting DD 5.1 sound, but not interested in Sky + other features. Can I connect a Sky + box to my existing dish, and get DD 5.1 sound without the subscription? Is there anything else I would need to do, or just simply replace my existing box with the Sky + box?

Yes you can but note that SKY+ has no autoview feature and can not be controlled by VCR's with IR sat control.

When you replace the digibox you will need to marry your existing smartcard to the SKY+ box, a quick call to SKY is all that is needed and you don't need to pay the £10 per month subscription.

However, SKY+ is useless as a hard drive recorder without the £10 a month subscription (waived if you pay for premium channels). If you only want to use SKY+ as a digital receiver, it works with FTA channels and FTV/subscription channels with a suitable smartcard. The s-video and optical connection (DD5.1 as well) work just fine without a subscription and the EPG is more or less the same as a standard SKY digibox but lacks the autoview.

Contributed by Mike C

SKY +

A customer raised a question about no audio output from the VCR scart on the new Pace Sky plus receiver. Here is some info supplied by Pace:-

"I have had a word with our engineers and it seems this is a particular feature of certain STB's when looped through certain VCR's (Sony in particular) and some (very few TV's) that hold Pin 8 High at all times.

The recommended fix is to simply put the STB in to standby mode to allow Pin 8 to be dropped and allow audio to loop through.

FYI - Sony VCR's are renowned for leaving pin 8 high when stop is triggered on the VCR. Sony have even implemented a button on the RCU on some models to drop pin 8 ("DISP"), as they are aware of this "feature."

I have also read that using a Scart to Phono lead might solve the problem of Pin 8 switching, however this may mean that Wide screen switching can be affected."

 

Can I copy data from the Hard Drive?

Yes, see http://www.skycopyplus.co.uk

 

What's the best Sky+ box?

Which model do I have?

See Sam's site for info.

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Copyright ©2002 Martin Pickering
Version 1.0 updated on December 13, 2003
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