Hi all, has anyone tried splitting the image from Homechoice. At the moment I have NTL and I split the image to two TVs (as this is the only way I can get to watch something on my kitchen). Is anyone doing this with HOmechoice? How does it affect the picture quality?

I am planning to move to Homechoice in the next two weeks.

Another question: my friend has Homechoice and the only thing he doesn't like is that when he changes channel it takes nearly 5 seconds to appear on the screen. Is that normal?

Thanks

there is a slight lag as opposed to using tv remote but when you think that on the tv the receiver is feet away from you whereas with homechoice it can be miles depending on which server you are on and the response has to travel equal distance back to the set top box.


johnny.

The HC box enables you to have a separate UHF and SCART output so you could run one TV off SCART and one off UHF if that worked.

Otherwise splitting the UHF signal should be fine (you might need an amplifier to maintain quality but probably not).

Delay is slightly noticeable but no worse IMHO than some of the earlier Freeview boxes..

Go for it!

save running cables you can purchase a pair of video senders which will do the job wirelessly but bear in mind both tv can only (at this time) view the same content.


johnny.

As the signals travel at nearly the speed of light you would need to be 2million miles away to account for a 5 second delay like that.

Not totally true, the actual signal speed may be about that fast, but the bandwidth is far too small to allow all required data to be transmitted in parallel - you are therefore bound to get a lag over copper wire.

absolutely.


johnny.

Err... no. Just how much data do you think they need to transmit to request a channel change??? Data like this will be almost instantaneous, even over many miles (eg websites from America normally load without delay).

The delay on homechoice will be to do with laoding of their servers somewhere - you can tell this is the case because the delay differs depending on what time of day it is. Eg it's worse at peak time when more people are watching.

Err...no. There may not be much data to send the request, but there is a large amount of data to receive before the picture can first be shown, hence why the channel change actually occurs but there is no picture for a few seconds. The amount of data returned by a web page is miniscule in comparison to the amount required to present a real time broadcast picture.

Accepted the server is certainly a factor as well.

The lag will be due to the way in which the video stream is being encoded. In order for your box to begin to display video it has to recieve a key frame known as an I frame. This frame contains all the info the STB needs to display a single picture, subsequent frames then reference info from that initial I frame as well as data in other subsequent frames. The I frame repetition rate will obviously affect the amount of time a STB takes to 'tune' to a channel. A longer I frame interval allows for more efficient MPEG4 encoding, but increases the channel change delay.

Thanks to everyone for their comments.

Do you have any more information about the video sender. Do you recommend any particular make? Does it interfere with a wireless network?

sgarrido

They can and do interfere with wireless networks, you will have to play with the settings (a sender has 4 channels available to it) to avoid interfereing with your wireless network.

Also senders only send a composite image (no RGB) and don't send SCART switching signals, such as widescreen to 4:3. And some *may* have problems sending VOD content because they can suffer from the content protection signal. Maplin or Argos are the best places to look.

The HC box has a loop through SCART but with SCART being bi-directional you can actually use this as an output. The quality is not as good as from the true output but allows you to output to 2 different TV's.

not really an option unless one wants a very long scart lead)


johnny.

True. Not sure what the max length of a SCART lead is before you lose the signal? You can get some fairly thin flat cables these days though, which might not be TOO intrusive.

If you ever use a microwave in your kitchen you won't be able to use the video-sender - microwaves pretty much kill video sender signals. Don't know anyone who uses one for more than a few minutes though.

You could use CAT5 to send the picture, but it needs a coder/decoder to do it.