Although live pause and instant rewind (or whatever the marketing names are) work well, it is always best to watch programs via the ‘Planner’ page. For example, Shortland Street is scheduled to be recorded, and you get home about halfway through. While you can just change to TV 2 (if necessary) and rewind, using rewind and fast forward as you expect, what you should do is go to the ‘Planner’ page and play the program from there. (Watching programs as they are recording is fine).

There are two benefits to this, both important. One is that the status in the ‘Planner’ page changes from Recording/Recorded to Viewed, which makes it much easier to keep track of what you’ve seen and what you haven’t. (It would be great if the PVR could do this itself, but without having sensors to tell that you’re in the room with the TV on, I can’t see how it can do that – although if you used the remote, that would tell it).

The other (more important) reason is that you can watch a recorded program and record two other programs at the same time, but you cannot watch ‘live paused’ TV and record two other programs at the same time (essentially, you’d be recording three programs). Continuing the example, when NCIS (Sky 1) and Charmed (TV 3) are both scheduled to be recorded at 7:30 when Shortland Street finishes, watching the recorded program isn’t a problem – it will stop at the end, and switch to taping the other two. Watching ‘paused’ or ‘rewound’ TV is a problem – when 7:30 arrives, you’ll have to choose to cancel one of the other two programs to continue watching Shortland Street.

technorati tags: MySky, SkyTV

In my initial impressions, I noted that the “Planner” page of the MySky interface wasn’t that great. So far, this is what has annoyed me most. Continue reading “MySky Interface” →

It’s minor, but another problem: you can’t fast forward in a playlist. It skips to the next item. Stupid.

technorati tags: MySky, SkyTV

A comment here indicates that for loopthrough to work one needs a SCART-SCART cable, and not SCART->component.  That would explain why it doesn’t work – and also makes the feature pretty worthless since there must be about 3 TVs in all of New Zealand that have SCART input.

technorati tags: MySky, SkyTV

Another MySky update: I moved everything about yesterday, removing the VCR from the lounge. The MySky manual mentions a “loopthrough” feature, in which a single AV channel on a TV can be shared between MySky and another device (e.g. a DVD player or PlayStation). The manual says to have the SCART output labelled “TV” go to the TV’s AV port (unsurprisingly), and (surprisingly) have the other SCART output (input?) go to the other device (e.g. DVD player). Then pressing the “AV” button on the remote will swap between Sky and the other device.

This would be useful for me, because unfortunately the TV in the lounge only has a single AV channel (and only one set of plugs, at the rear), so I could plug both the DVD player and MySky in (rather than the current setup, which has the DVD player plugged in, and Sky through the RF leads, which isn’t as high quality).

However, this just doesn’t seem to work. The “TV” SCART seems to output the MySky signal or (if “AV” is pressed) no signal at all. The other SCART constantly outputs the MySky signal (as with non-PVR Sky, it’s an output, not an input). The other video connections are all output as well.

Something else to ask about as well as the broken series link feature, I suppose.

technorati tags: MySky, SkyTV

It’s been about 48 hours since I had my MySky box installed, so I thought I’d note down a few initial impressions. Continue reading “Initial MySky Impressions” →

New Zealand’s SkyTV finally got around to introducing a PVR/PDR (a la TiVo), which goes by the not-particularly-great name “MySky”.

Continue reading “Getting MySky” →