Clearly, TiVo is mature (whether it manages to survive amongst all the competition, particularly from PVRs like MySky that are from content providers, is a separate question). So an easy way to consider whether the MySky design is mature is to compare the features of the two systems. Continue reading “Is MySky “mature”?”
The Listener’s Take on MySky
My parents have subscribed to The Listener for as long as I remember. When I left home, I subscribed too, and continued for nine years, until Pamela Stirling took over as editor and turned the magazine into a trashy, pale, copy of what it once was. I do occasionally glance over their website, however, and noticed Russell Brown’s MySky review.
Either they give the reviewers the only working copies, or Brown didn’t use it long enough for it to break, like it has for everyone else I’ve heard of that has it.
Laughably, Brown says:
My Sky, benefiting from the experience of Sky’s siblings in Britain and Australia, is a mature product.
A mature product, in my opinion, is one that works. Not one that fails daily.
He does continue to say:
What that means is that it’s an absolute doddle to use.
So I suppose he has a different definition to “mature product” than most people. MySky is simple to use. However, I really do feel that to be “mature”, a product has to be well tested, which should mean few bugs. MySky is nowhere near that category.
Latest MySky Correspondence
For a while, I had an email conversation going with SkyTV about the problems, and it did appear that things were progressing. Not any more. They seem to have given up, and have decided to treat me as someone completely unknown. My latest email:
MySky Live Pause/Rewind Failure
A new (just what I need!) MySky problem appeared yesterday: live pause & rewind no longer worked: they displayed a “this program cannot be recorded” error message, even when nothing else was recording (and on any channel).
I managed to fix this with a reboot (hold down ‘go back’ and ‘select’ on the front panel), but it’s yet another reason to avoid MySky for now.
More about MySky Series Link
In the comments to an older post, John Porter passed on a very interesting email about how the MySky Series Link feature is implemented. Continue reading “More about MySky Series Link”
Quoting and flormat=flowed
A few days back, Hawk Wings had an interesting post about Why Mail.app quotes the way it does. The post linked to the "format=flowed FAQ", which is a great piece that explains how format=flowed quoting works, and why it is a good idea. I’ll update my page about good quoting practice (and the corresponding post) to include some of the material from there, and a reference to it.
Extracting video from baby ultrasound scans
When my wife has an ultrasound to check that our baby is still going well, we get a copy of the imaging that the radiologist sees, which is nice (this is pretty standard, I believe). However, what we get is an SVCD. This plays fine on our DVD player (I’m not sure about the PS2), and when it’s put in a Windows machine, there’s a data track that has a player.
However, I really want this data as a video file on the mac. Going straight from the disk, nothing seemed to want to read it (which surprises me somewhat; perhaps I’m just missing how to do it).
The first scan (03/02/06) I managed to get the data out with a couple of different tools and ended up with an avi file that worked fine. However, that didn’t go so smoothly this time (17/02/06).
Eventually, I found a page that explained how I can do this, using a tool called IsoBuster.
I then used Ultra MPEG Converter to convert the extracted MPEG (2?) to MPEG 1 (resize, preserving aspect ratio), which Quicktime (and therefore iMovie) was able to work with.
Possibly I’ll figure out a better way to do this next time (about 7 weeks away), but in case I don’t, at least I’ll be able to remember what I did this time 🙂
Gmail and SpamCop
My now lengthy email discussion with SkyTV about my MySky problems hit a new snag today: I have been using my gmail account for this correspondence, and my last message failed to be delivered:
This is an automatically generated Delivery Status Notification
Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently:
skyweb@skytv.co.nz
Technical details of permanent failure:
PERM_FAILURE: SMTP Error (state 9): 550 Rule imposed as tony.meyer@gmail.com is blacklisted on SpamCop or SpamHaus
Searching, I see a couple of articles ([1], [2]) that indicate this isn’t anything new. I’m not sure why all the previous messages made it through – perhaps SpamCop just made an update, or some sort of load-sharing at gmail switched me to a different SMTP server.
What a PITA. Back to regular mail for now, I guess. Please, anyone who can decide, don’t use SpamCop. Blacklisting is such a stupid system, especially blacklisting one of the world’s most popular webmail systems.
On the subject of MySky…
While I’m pointing out MySky flaws – it continually bounces back to the preview channel. Why?
It also comes up with the ‘conflict’ screen fairly regularly, with a program that is recording or set to recording and a “searching…” ‘recording’. Cancelling the “searching…” ‘recording’ seems to fix the problem. I think this is the series link system trying to find new episodes, but that shouldn’t cause a conflict.
Another MySky Failure
Another program failed tonight. MySky was set to record Shortland Street from 7pm to 7:30pm. My wife watched last night’s episode while tonight’s was on; the red light was on the whole time, and nothing else was being recorded.
After finishing last night’s episode, she started to watch tonight’s. The planner showed that all 30 minutes had recorded. She managed to watch two and a half ads, and then the recording stopped. She went back to the planner, and it now says that 0 minutes were taped. In other words, the program is lost.
I sent yet another email to Sky. This is really unacceptable, and clearly a faulty product.
TonyAndrewMeyer 