I have had 2 replacement Sky HD cards, neither of which would work, and rang up to find out why the promised third card had not turned up in the 4-5 days promised. To cut a long story short (the phone call lasted around 50 minutes!), I finished up being put through to a Sky Technical in Derry to get the problem fixed with a software download. The end result was a Sky HD box which refused to come out of standby, along with a message on the TV asking for the old viewing card to be inserted. The Sky Technical lady refused to believe that there was a message on the screen, saying that this was impossible if the box was on standby, and asked if there was another person in the room she could talk to. I said that I could send a photo of what I was seeing if she didn't believe me, but she said it wouldn't do any good. (It would certainly have made me feel better!). So here for the record in the link below is an original unretouched photo of an impossible event. The Sky HD box is second from the bottom and the red standby light is clearly visible next to the open card slot. I now have to leave the box alone as is for the next 24 hours and hope....

Picasa Web Albums - Denis

and asked if there was another person in the room she could talk to

lol - she's making out you're special needs

Don't get me started on Sky HD box problems!

I have to reset the box nearly every day, because of a variety of faults which result in the box "locking out", and still I can't get them to send a technician out! They just keep telling me that "it can't happen" or "Just run the houskeeping" ie reset the box!

I think if anyone had asked if there was someone else in the room they could have talked to, it would ha been the last straw!!!!!

but on this thread http://briskoda.net/tech-shed/tell-me-about-sky-hd/159427/ the fanbois (& gurlz) say its the best thing since sliced bread

:confused:

but on this thread http://briskoda.net/tech-shed/tell-me-about-sky-hd/159427/ the fanbois (& gurlz) say its the best thing since sliced bread

:confused:

I think that when they are working , they do the job very nicely , but they are pretty temperamental bits of kit.

In general a good PVR of any sort is fantastic

That sums SKY up really.

When we changed over to SKY broadband they disconnect us from our current provider BEFORE they sent out the router, (which can take upto 14 days!) "no problem, give me the login details and i will use my router until yours turns up", their reply was "oh sorry we can't do that, anyway it would not work with a third party router"!!

Oh really? 30 mins later i had SKY BB up and running on my old router (after much searching)

Thir d person I've heard of this happening too know. Two with SKy plus and now you Denis.

Of coursee they claim there is no problem

When we got sky+ we had some problems recording certain channels which, after several phone calls to sky, was put down to our viewing card being deactivated (or something like that). So therefore our sky couldn't possibly work (even though it did, we could watch channels just not record them), they couldn't reset it because the card was dead, they couldn't send out a new card because the old one was dead...

After several more calls our problem was referred to a "special" department (presumably staffed by special people, well more "special" than the normal staff) who could sort the problem as they had special powers over the mighty omnipotent computer system that controls the rest of the staff. Only thing was, you couldn't speak to this department and the normal sky people couldn't either. They could only email them!

Eventually after being promised that it would be sorted tomorrow for a week, it magically worked again. In the mean time I rang sky pretty much everyday only to be told that our sky couldn't possibly be working, had we tried turning the box on and off and eventually that the special people would have to sort it out etc...

If you remove a valid card it does this IIRC as part of the boot cycle is checking for a line, valid card, and signal, then EPG update/info before it cant be turned on.

My last reset took 20 min to come back to life!

I've got the problem the other way round - box is on but nothing on the screen! Not even an error message.

I noticed it didn't start recording Bones at 9... and also not Lie to Me at 10... so I set the planner to rebuild and now it won't do anything.

Sigh. I'm a fan of Sky, the plus-ness and HD, when its working properly!

Nice customer service there.

What happened to the customer is always right?

If you look at the statistics, the number one point of failure for any PVR is the HDD. With a well ventilated box your generally fine (although HDDs do die far too often in my experience), but bad ventilation can bring about a premature death of the HDD.

PVRs use the HDD quite extensively, and if it happens to die in a critical place, all sorts of behaviour can happen.

I had that with an old Sky+ box, started doing all sorts of weird stuff, getting worse and worse, till i got fed up of moaning at Sky tech support, changed the HDD (to a bigger one), and never had any problems again.

As with almost every technology company, the people on the end of the phone are only reading from a script. Getting through to the engineers who can actually help is a PITA.

TBH if you design a box properly you can cool the HDD just fine.

For example you can get 48HDD's all next to each other in 4u working just fine without any problems.

To me that is a design issue in that the device manufacturers have not provided sufficient cooling to the disk.

TBH if you design a box properly you can cool the HDD just fine.

For example you can get 48HDD's all next to each other in 4u working just fine without any problems.

To me that is a design issue in that the device manufacturers have not provided sufficient cooling to the disk.

I completely agree.

To be fair though, its as much the users responsibility to make sure theres sufficiant space for air movement.

Having seen the setup of various friends boxes, im quite supprised they last more than 5 minutes

Well if they don't believe you they can bloody well send someone out to look for themselves. Seriously, idiotic call centres do my head in! Just because it's not on 'the list' must mean it's not possible; yeah, good one

Steve

What happens if you power cycle the box with no viewing card inserted, it should boot up and then you can insert your white viewing card.

I completely agree.

To be fair though, its as much the users responsibility to make sure theres sufficiant space for air movement.

Having seen the setup of various friends boxes, im quite supprised they last more than 5 minutes

The box I describe above has maybe 2mm in front of the disc and very restricted air flow.

There are plenty of ways of moving heat from the HDD, such as a heat pipe cooler to the back of the case. A fan could then be used here.

Either way, it's obvious that the things are going to have restricted cooling and it's not like laptops have huge cooling either, but they don't die every 5 minutes (touch wood).

I don't understand why they don't use the 5400RPM drives, for example there is now a >600GB 2.5" 5400rpm laptop drive that would be ideal. Even without it the 5400RPM 3.5" drives need very limited cooling.

With your crystal ball Mark, when will Sky boxes get SSDs?

With your crystal ball Mark, when will Sky boxes get SSDs?

The price of those things has to come down even further IMHO. They also don't respond well to lots of writing, preferring to be mostly read.

Since PVR's tend to do approximately 1:1 write to reads on the media, assuming people record then watch then record over it, this would mean a very short life before errors start to set in.

That plus a complication on slow writing data to the SSD as you need to read, erase and then write a whole chunk at a time and not just a bit.

With the price of hard discs being so low per GB compared to the SSD, I can't see it happening in the next few years and maybe not at all with the current SSD technology.

OK, fair enough - perhaps not the ideal solution to the cooling/heat production issue then!

Steve

I don't understand why they don't use the 5400RPM drives.

Well, they may be ok for SD boxes, but id imagine Dual Recordings, plus a seperate playback, all at high resolution HD (as well as all the stuff PVRs would do with their disks) would challenge a 5400RPM drive.

That said, i dont know the sustained transfer rates of modern HDDs :confused:

Due to much higher areal density on the platters the low spin speed doesn't mean very low throughput.

Raw HD 1080p is 1.5Gbit/s so you would need 3Gbit/s raw, which would max out a single drive SATA II connection anyway, and I can't think of a single drive that can do that on it's own right now.

To do HD dual record plus single playback on any single disk system is probably beyond reality if you assume everything is raw HD.

Even with the fastest HDD around, you still would be doing random writes or reads and writes when doing two programmes at once, so that would also hit the data rate massively.

For that reason I would have thought most PVR's either make use of the drives cache or have a few MB of caches themselves to smooth things over when seeking.

So if we move away from raw and assume that the data rate is the maximum of 20MB/s for a broadcast channel. Typically this is 720p anyway, but that isn't an issue.

So you need to be able to do more than 60MB/s random write and reads combined to do two records and a playback.

Clever firmware meaning areas are kept clear in sequential tracks across multiple platters might help as long as there are lots of heads, but it's still a big ask for any single hard disk.

I've done some work on managing multiple HD streams and even taking the disk out of the equation, there are issues. For example often the computer can't keep up with decoding more than one stream and pulling the data or the data network just can't get the data out fast enough to do real time. There are lots of issues and they are not cheap to get around.

Basically, doing 2 HD records and 1 HD play back is going to be a big ask of most systems unless the price of the unit is permitted to rise significantly.

Edited 16 October, 200916 yr by cheezemonkhai

Wonder how Denis is getting along?

Left the box undisturbed for 24 hours after which all was OK after I unplugged it from the mains then plugged it in again.

I'll see if I can find a real answer to this - I'm actually working with them at the moment and can probably get to speak to the guys writing the OS on the STBs

Can you find out how to calculate the diag test code?