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Received by email

With the demise of the satellite signal for the UK services, is there any chance one of the brilliant forum experts could knock up an comprehensive article about the options now available (for your weekly bulletin).

I've seen so many conflicting stories I'm completely lost (as I'm sure many others are).

Thanks in advance

Kate wrote:Received by email

With the demise of the satellite signal for the UK services, is there any chance one of the brilliant forum experts could knock up an comprehensive article about the options now available (for your weekly bulletin).

I've seen so many conflicting stories I'm completely lost (as I'm sure many others are).

Thanks in advance

I can't find it now but didn't Alan write one for the magazine a few issues back? Perhaps that could be used as a starting point.

Russell.

This article, written by Alan Wallis, is very informative.
It's the first Hi-Tech/Geek article.

I think the problem s that there is no longer any "all" to pull together. There are endless different ways of getting an endless range of possible services. It depends on what you already have, what you want, how techie you and all other users are, and much more. I promised, foolishly, to write a round-up on another thread. But there will be no substitute for thinking hard about what you want, what you have already got, and how much you want to pay.

As I have said many times over the past few weeks...DONT PANIC.

I should give it at least two weeks before the Mysterons in charge of the show have sorted out the positions of the two Astra satellites.

At the end of February is the time to start thinking about dish upgrades A lot of bright people are very busy working on a solution.

Meanwhile lay in a stock of decent books, games and DVD and start talking to each other. Amazon UK have reported record sales of books, not Kindle, in January to Europe. And in this weather we have enjoyed many walks in the warm sun, a welcome relief from other years.

It's not all doom and gloom in this neck of the woods.

For what it's worth this is the text of an email my OH sent to a friend who was suddenly stuck.

"You will need to connect your computer to your TV. How you do it will depend on what connections are available. The choice is usually the old style VGA connectors (the one with lots of pins), DIVX which is sort of oblong plug/socket with some square holes and HDMI which are the small plugs used to connect modern boxes like a Humax to a digital TV. HDMI carries sound and picture, the other two need a separate sound connection. Usually the computer and TV don't have to be that close. I've used 4m cable runs without problems. You may need to adjust your TV to display the computer output correctly. Especially the digital feeds. We've connected a cheap PC speaker system to the computer so we don't need the TV on when listening to the radio. As luck would have it we have a spare PC which we can set right under the TV.

You have ADSL so there's no problem connecting through the net. At least for SD. We have our computer set so that BBC Radio is the home page. We've grouped all the pages we want as favourites. BBC Radio and Filmon as one group. These are the ones we can get without any special trickery. The rest are those that we can only get via a VPN. Mostly the catch up channels. The picture quality is OK but not as good as when we had satellite coverage.

I don't recommend you spend any serious money until everything settles down. With a couple of million Brits living in Europe somebody is surely going to come up with a decent solution giving us the picture quality and viewing flexibility that we have come to expect."


Mary S

Merisin wrote:For what it's worth this is the text of an email my OH sent to a friend who was suddenly stuck.

"You will need to connect your computer to your TV. How you do it will depend on what connections are available. The choice is usually the old style VGA connectors (the one with lots of pins), DIVX which is sort of oblong plug/socket with some square holes and HDMI which are the small plugs used to connect modern boxes like a Humax to a digital TV. HDMI carries sound and picture, the other two need a separate sound connection. Usually the computer and TV don't have to be that close. I've used 4m cable runs without problems. You may need to adjust your TV to display the computer output correctly. Especially the digital feeds. We've connected a cheap PC speaker system to the computer so we don't need the TV on when listening to the radio. As luck would have it we have a spare PC which we can set right under the TV.

You have ADSL so there's no problem connecting through the net. At least for SD. We have our computer set so that BBC Radio is the home page. We've grouped all the pages we want as favourites. BBC Radio and Filmon as one group. These are the ones we can get without any special trickery. The rest are those that we can only get via a VPN. Mostly the catch up channels. The picture quality is OK but not as good as when we had satellite coverage.

I don't recommend you spend any serious money until everything settles down. With a couple of million Brits living in Europe somebody is surely going to come up with a decent solution giving us the picture quality and viewing flexibility that we have come to expect."

Mary S

I'm almost certain that most of the million Brits in France are not giving us a thought about no television on the warm parts of France. And using an extra computer is a poor choice for viewing for the future television. The small "boxes" mentioned on this forum doesn't take too much place under the TV. I was using my laptop, which cost about 500€, but the small G-Box is cheaper, smaller and quicker than the laptop.

I'm not trying your thoughts about using an "extra" computer for the TV. It's a method which can be used but maybe there are better and/or cheaper to use some small android which can handle out new viewing problems.

I've checked with some of the expat forums in France and nobody is is posting about "our" problem. I did find one poster mentioning that he's worrying about this problem near his TV viewing in Paris.

Blackduff