hi,

Any advice appreciated here... i have a 37" toshiba WLT68 telly and normal sky... I don't have the sports or movies package but will get the sports when the prem starts.

I need sky+ and living in a tenement flat this maybe an issue according to the sky people.

i have read on here and other forums that sky through a HDMI is amazing, and that i should get hold of a sky hd box, which also has a much bigger hard disk for recording programmes as well, rather than buying a sky+ box from sky themselves.

on ebay they seem to be a very reasonable price and also come with a head for the dish (quad LNB), am i right in thinking this will remove the issue of other users in the other 7 flats using the same dish?

if anyone can see any possible problems in my plan can they please tell me?!

THANKS
iainw

A quad LNB is only of use to you if you own the satellite dish - and at a guess the satellite dish is owned by the company that rents out the flat to you and the other seven tenants. You won't be able to go fit your quad LNB to the dish - it will probably already have an octo on it, with one feed going to each of the 8 tenements.

Several options - see whether either of your immediate neighbours are using their Sky feed, if not you might be able to use that to provide twin cable input into your flat.

Or, you might be able to put a second dish on your balcony/window, which might be facing in the right direction.

Or, at worst, do like other people who live in communal flats do, and make do with a single input to your Sky+/Sky HD box. It's a pain, you can't record two programmes simultaneously, you can't record one programme while watching another, but you can still record what you are watching, watch a previous recording while recording something else, and pause live TV.

Or, find somewhere else to live. < 32E8 /div>
Broadz

My understanding is that if you buy a HD box, sky will only activate it with an HD subscription.

So you would have to pay an extra 10 pounds a month for the HD even if you have no plans to use it.

My Sky+ box is 5 years old and getting grumpy and I thought about doing the same thing until I found out about the mandatory 10 pounds charge.

Thats is incorrect, if the box is bought of ebay (just like my second HD box) you do NOT have to take the HD subs out as I haven't on the box I got of ebay.

Wrong. Sky will only insist on you subscribing to Sky HD if you buy the box off them. Buy it from eBay, or simplydigital, or anybody else, and you can do what you like with it. You can still watch BBC HD on your HD box (if you have a HD TV) without ever subscribing to Sky HD.

When I talked to a supplier about buying an HD box to replace my failing Sky+ box and not taking out an HD subscription, I was told that Sky would not allow it and I would have to pay the extra 10 quid a month even though I did not have a TV to receive HD.

It would have been a non contract HD box at ?299.

Can you buy the SKY HD box - stick in your own card and then watch BBC HD and all your normal SD channels?

I ahve heard soem non sky boxes will make SD better looking - is this true of SKY boxes?

Yes you can. Though you will still have to contact Sky to pair the card with the new box, else you won't be able to watch premium channels (sports and movies) or use the recording aspect of the box. But, in contrary to what uk_jih says, you do not have to take out a Sky HD subscription from Sky unless you buy the HD box direct from Sky. In fact, you don't even have to take out a HD subscription from Sky if you do buy the box from them, but they will charge you ?399 for it without a subscription.

Then he was either talking crap, or he'd come to an agreement with Sky that he would only sell their boxes to people who agreed to take out a Sky HD subscription. But that is certainly not the case if you buy the box from eBay, or from other suppliers. Sky do not have the ability to enforce you to take out a HD subscription if the only HD channel that you want to watch is BBC HD - that is paid for by your licence fee. Sky don't own BBC HD.

As this thread started with buying a HD box off ebay, do you mind if I hijack the thread

Can anyone reccommend a retailier off ebay that they have bought a HD box off and had no problems??

Got mine off Dealing Digital and would recommend but i don't think he has any listed at the moment

One point to bear in mind that warranty (if any) for boxes bought from ebay (or anywhere online except Sky) will be on a return to seller basis and unless you have a spare box you will be without Sky until a repaired/replacement is received. Sky will have nothing to do with problems on your box.

I badly wanted to buy an HD box from Sky to replace my ailing Sky + box but they would only sellmne one for £360 - totally ridiculous price for a customer on the full muktiroom sub with HD as main box This was despite them sendinf out letters to everyone and their cat for £149 even if they had been with Sky for many, many fewer years than us (18 years in our case).

After several tries I got nowhere and had to buy a box for £199 from a legit dealer and feel very badly let down by Sky over this.

So the comment that Sky will not do anything if the box goes wrong is doubly infuriating.

I understand the logistics, but they gave me no option by their total intransigence.

Hopefully this issue will not crop up, but for those who have bought an HD box not from Sky what are our options to protect ourselves after the 1 year warranty expires?

Certainly if Sky will just say we wash our hands of you then I will definitely wash my hands of the £800 a year that I pay them.

1) What about SKY + - i assume you have to still pay a tenner for that on non subscription?

2) Will newer HD boxes display SD better than say 5 year old SD boxes?

The OP suggested he didn't want to subscribe to Sky HD, not that he didn't want to subscribe to Sky at all. As long as you subscribe to some Sky package, the £10 Sky+ will be waived in eight days time. Obviously if you don't subscribe to Sky at all then you will have to pay £10pm for the Sky+ features. But there's not much worth recording if you don't have any form of Sky subscription.

Certainly if the new HD box is connected via HDMI rather than scart, the SD picture quality is much better (or so most people claim, including myself). If you still connect via scart then I'm not sure what improvement the picture quality will have. I had a Sky+ PVR1 (about five years old) and a Sky+ PVR2 (about eighteen months old) and the picture quality on those two had no discernible difference when both output RGB picture via scart to the same LCD.