Hello, I'm new to this site and apologise in advance if I have placed my question in the wrong place. My query is as follows - I am house sitting for a couple who used to live in the USA. The TV is from the USA (bought there), I cannot get BBC ceefax or use the RED BUTTON (the red button on the remote is for a different function). Perhaps I should add that they have FREESAT with a FortecStar set top box.
I'm assuming that I cannot get RED BUTTON and Ceefax due to the equipment not being compatible?
Thanks for any advice.

As the TV is American it cannot receive any UK terrestrial broadcasts so the only way you can get TV is via the external satellite box. And that includes any Red button and text services, if the satellite receiver supports those services.

The TV is just a glorified monitor in this instance so everything you do has to be done via the satellite receiver. The TV won't do anything beyond display pictures and make a noise. So if you want red button or text services you have to do so using the satellite remote not the TV remote.

Ceefax stopped in October 2012, but I assume you mean the digital equivalent.

As above, the FortecStar may be a generic satellite box, or a proper freesat box. It doesn't mean that it supports UK red button services though. A model number would be handy.

The Fortec Star is not a Freesat box, it is a generic free to air satellite receiver. According to the Fortec website their models do support teletext, but that doesn't mean it supports the version used by Freesat in the UK. If you press the red button on the satellite receiver's remote while viewing the main BBC channels and get nothing, or an error, then it's obvious the box doesn't support Freesat/BBC digital text I'm afraid.

Does the box display the full 7 day EPG for the Freesat channels?. I very much doubt it does either.

Fortec would have to pay a license fee to Freesat to use the full Freesat EPG and to access their digital text services. If the box doesn't carry the official Freesat logo then it's likely you are out of luck.

Hello and thanks for your responses to my query. I think I get what you are saying and you are correct when you say the Fortec box doesn't show the full EPG for 7 days - just the info for the current/next program. The red button on the Satellite remote doesn't show anything either.

My husband will just have to do without Football Focus on a Saturday afternoon!

Thanks very much again.

fortec box will get uk sat channels via scanning but has neither epg nor red button services as found on both sky and freesat receivers

the extra video streams which are occasionally accessible via red button do appear as "channels" but it can be difficult to pick them out in a list of several hundred .....

..... the cheapest freesat receivers with 7 day epg & red button are now maybe around £25 .........

If you can find a channel called "BBC Red Button 1", you will probably find it on there at 4:30pm as normal.

When you press the red and select "Final Score" on a "proper" Freesat/Freeview box, all that happens is that the box re-tunes to that channel. Most generic (non-Freesat) boxes can see the channel itself, even though they don't understand the code to automatically jump to it (or access any of the BBC red button's text content).

If you tune to BBC Red Button 1, I don't know if there are any vital additional "red button" textural overlays which will be missing on a generic box, or if all the important information is carried in the channel's standard video stream during the programme.

Cheers,
David,

for a red button video feed then yes, effectively it is one more tv channel. problem is it likely to have a name comprising random letters not including "bbc"........

if these are semi permanent channels then they might possibly be listed at satbeams and lyngsat websites. i dont know.

you could also take a basic freesat receiver with you - they are quite small - and plug the dish cable into it !

http://en.kingofsat.net/freqs.php?&p...q&filtre=Clear

Service ID (SID) 6390

A really dumb blind scan would put it where it is in that list: one above BBC One Channel Islands.

Cheers,
David.

Thanks again for replies. We did a scan soon after moving in as there were about 6 of everything (i.e., 6 BBC 1, 6 ITV 1, 6 ITV 2 and so on etc., etc. for just about every station). We deleted everything and then re-scanned and then deleted all the extra stations that we did not need however, we didn't see anything RED BUTTON 1. We did get some new stations that weren't there previously.

I'm not very technical so excuse me if this is a silly question but if we bought a different box and unplugged the FortecStar box - I'm assuming the new equipment would work OK with the American TV?

Thanks again

Some boxes are capable of converting 50Hz broadcasts to 60Hz, the Fortec Star may be one. (Most Americal TV's won't work at 50Hz). If this is the case a UK Freesat box may not work with the TV.

The reason you get so many channels is there are lots of regional variations at 28.2E.

http://en.kingofsat.net/freqs.php?&p...q&filtre=Clear

It's not exactly clear on the FortecStar website but they do mention "Automatic PAL/NTSC conversion" but so far I have failed to find what exactly that means. It's not mentioned in the manuals I have dipped into beyond that phrase.

So not entirely sure if it does convert 50Hz to 60Hz but I would not be at all surprised if that what they mean by that phrase.

I am unclear if that myth may be no longer true! To explain some friends in Canada are using a UK DVD player just fine with a (very new) North American Hitachi LCD TV.

Either their UK DVD player is upconverting to 60Hz OR modern LCD TVs are getting more flexible!

Plenty of (especially cheaper) UK DVDs players will happily convert.

North American equipment is more forgiving via HDMI than other connections, but there's still lots of it that won't display 50Hz content correctly.

Cheers,
David.

Just a thought. Aren't US region Blu-Ray movie disks 24 fps like they would be in the UK? That's not so very far off UK broadcast 25fps so you would think it not beyond the realms of possibility that if a US TV can handle 24fps from Blu-Ray via HDMI it should handle 25fps as well.

Or would that be way too simple

Next time I visit my expat friends in Canada I must try and work it out! A recent LCD TV from a global brand (Hitachi) would seem to maximise the chances of it coping with 50Hz signals!

As has just been pointed out (last post!) don't recent US TVs need to cope with 24Hz (24p) BluRays as well as 30p/60i signals?

Yes they do, but syncing at 23.976 fps does not mean it will handle 50hz 25fps content. Pretty well all blu-rays use 23.976 fps. US 60p content is actually 2 x 23.976.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blu-ray_Disc.

Many UK TV's won't handle 24fps, Blu-ray players recode to 60fps for these which introduces some motion artefacts.

Best thing is get the OP to get hold of a UK VCR/setop box and see if it will play back.

Not at all, Hitachi are almost totally just a badge on low-spec cheap crap (Vestel sets in Europe), presumably it's just a badge in North America as well? (certainly North America was doing the cheap crap badge thing way before the UK).

... although the fact that the TV may well be cheap (probably Mexican in this case; IIRC one of the big Japanese cheap manufacturers, Orion or Funai flood the US market with TVs built there) will probably work in the OP's favour; those cheap TVs are most often multi-standard where the premium stuff lags behind in this regard.

Certainly Viseo is one such large US brand of cheap sets; they're made in Mexico by Funai and the couple I've seen have been 50Hz compatible.

That would be a nice bonus - all of the American import gear I've seen has been useless over here.

Easilly and cheaply solved these days:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/OREI-XD-Volt...ref=pd_cp_ce_1

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Generic-HDV-...ref=pd_cp_ce_2

Not really, it still leaves you with a zero spec TV totally unsuitable for the UK.

2Becided (David) solved this for you above.

When dealing with channels outside of an EPG, you should have a list that looks something like this (this is actually on a Freesat box in non freesat mode, but it should be similar on a non freesat box):

http://purplesat.com/web_images/foxs...enu_26e_1a.jpg

If you pull this list of channels up in your box and look for channel 6390 in the channel list, then it will be BBC 1 Red Button channel.

Thank you - I'll look for channel 6390 when I turn TV on later.

(I should add that we used to live in Australia and still have our TV in storage there - I'm a bit concerned now as to whether it will work when we eventually get it back here. My husband will go nuts as it was quite an expensive telly when we bought it)!

Thanks again