All posts by Capvermell
Below are all of Capvermell's postings, with the most recent are at the bottom of the page.
Responding further to MikeB you can set up a Favourites list on Freesat but you can't then change the order in which the channels are presented in the Favourites list to one that makes sense for a customer with an HD television.
That is in particular to put ITV HD and C4HD at positions three and four in the Favourites list where they belong. The best you can do on the Freesat side of a Panasonic GT50 series set is to physically de-select channels 102 to 104 as channels you receive (101 has to be kept for the BBC regional news opt out) and then do the same for the BBC Three and BBC Four, BBC News, CBeebies and CBBC equivalents. This means you at least now don't have SD channel equivalents to now HD capable channels in your Favourites EPG list but unfortunately ITV HD and C4 HD plus BBC Three HD and BBC Four HD are now totally out of order.
On the Freeview side of the same television (Panasonic TX-P42GT50) everything can be put how I want it to be with BBC ONE HD, BBC Two HD, ITV HD and C4HD all at the top of the channel list and swapped number wise with their HD counterparts. This is true for both Favourites and Non Favourites as it is done in the channels receivable menu functionality..
Unfortunately at my relative's address it is bang under the Northolt landing flight path about 7 miles from Northolt Airport and it is on a very busy main road with a lot of mobile phone and/or high powered taxi radio equipment in use and a large oak tree in the way of the signal path to Crystal Palace. This means that despite several efforts we cannot get a Freeview aerial that does not suffer No Signal problems for one to two seconds at a time during the afternoon rush hour (probably happens in the morning two but telly is not being watched then) and when a plane is landing directly overhead to Northolt AIrport.
So Freesat should be the way ahead here except its customers are treated like morons with idiotic channel numbering choices only relevant to customers with an SD television being enforced on HD viewers. We all know the law is there to stop Sky shunting BBC One, BBC TWO, ITV, C4, Five etc behind Sky One, Sky, Two, Sky Three, etc but surely the writers of the law never intended to stop satellite and cable viewers having BBC One HD, BBC Two HD, ITV HD at the top of the list once these HD channel equivalents became widely available???
You tell me there is a Heath Robinson workaround by writing down the HD channel numbers in a list. Even I have trouble remembering them (especially ITV HD, C4HD and BBC Three HD, BBC Four HD and BBC News HD) so how do you expect my soon to be 80 year old mother to do so.
The current situation is totally unacceptable and the law should be rewritten to allow customers with HD sets to use a swap function that changes the BBC, ITV, C4 HD channels with their SD counterparts if the customer wants to invoke that function.
What actually needs to happen is simple, unfortunately making the regulators get on with doing it does not seem to be simple.
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But why do Euronews seem to be hiding their continuing Astra2 broadcast frequency? It is not published on their own web page at EuroNews or listed at www.lyngsat.com
Surely this frequency isn't only there for users of the Sky EPG?
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Friday 26 July 2013 7:08PM
I persuaded my mum to get a Panasonic TX-P42GT50 42" so called Smart Plasma tv to replace her ageing and failing Sony 26" CRT set.
This telly has both Freesat and Freeview tuners and on its Freesat side you are allowed to swap channel numbers in its main channel list as well as being able to deselect some channels from showing altogether.
Using this functionality I moved BBC One HD, BBC Two HD, ITV HD and C4HD in to channel numbers 1, 2, 3 and 4 whilst the SD channels were reassigned to 101 to 104 I also de-selected the SD channel variants of these channels on Freeview from showing in the EPG at all with the exception of Channel 101 (which is now the BBC SD channel). Through Favourites I could then also construct a list with BBC 1 HD at 1 followed by BBC SD at 101, BBC Two HD at 2, ITV1 HD at 3 and C4 HD at 4. This means HD channels are always viewed for these major channels except when the regional news opt out happens on BBC One.
However over on the Freesat Tv it is completely impossible to do the same thing because Freesat has specified that the channel numbers cannot be altered by the end user and the only adjustment the end user can make is to suppress certain channels from appearing at all in the EPG. So now we have a Freesat EPG with no channel 101, 102, 103 or 104 in it and BBC One HD on 108 and ITV HD and C4 HD on whatever ridicuous numbers Freeview has allocated to them. This in effect makes the Freesat side of the tv completely unusable for day to day viewing as a result of which the Freeview part is nearly always used except when something on a satellite only channel needs to be watched.
Just what part exactly of "totally shooting themselves in the foot" is it that Ms Emma Scott and her fellow board directors at Freesat do not seem to get?