Posted on the main IPTV board but no takers, so moving my question to here.......

If I get Tiscali TV, do all my channels arrive as IPTV streams down my DSL? Is this data QOS'd? Does anyone ever experience congestion, what happens to the picture? If I have 8meg, how much of this is used?

What is the nominal quality like, I have Sky at the moment

Is the PVR as noisy as everyone says?

Does it look like HD content will be offered soon(BBC HD and the like)?

Partial answers:

I have Tiscali+, which is a PVR. The box receives as many channels as it can via free-to-air, and the Tiscali-only channels are IPTV.

The box is a twin-record model, so you can record two Freeview channels and one IPTV channel at the same time ... but only ever one IPTV channel.

I don't know what QOS is.

I use wifi on my laptop rather than broadband on my PC when watching Tiscali, so can't answer re speed, but my visiting brother doesn't complain when he's using his PC... but we don't play online games or suchlike.

There is no inter-activity (red button) with any channels. Tiscali have unofficially told me that they are working on a new PVR with interactivity and other enhancements.

I think that HD depends on upgrading of phone lines amongst other things. Others here may advise.

Picture-wise, I get 'problems' with aspect ratio after viewing channels like Discovery and Animal Planet which broadcast strange shapes 'n sizes - when switching to, say, BBC1 the picture is 4:3 and I have to go into Settings or flip thru several channels to get it back to 16:9. There may occasionally be brief break-up of picture, but not often. Picture quality is comparable to Freeview and from what I hear it's similar to or better than Sky SD.

The PVR is noisy compared to the fanless ones I'm accustomed to, but no noisier than the Humax I tried out. It's a hum/whine which may not be noticed in a lounge setting and is not noticeable when watching TV.

Hope this helps somewhat.

parthena

Cheers,

QOS is quality of service and refers to methods to prioritise different types of network traffic.

I'm just watching Birth of America recorded from Nat Geog, and am reminded that sometimes there's a slight lip-sync problem. I've been FF-ing and REW-ing quite a bit, that might have caused it?? This happens more often on Tiscali than on my other PVRs.

parthena

Yes,there is QOS on tiscali tv.

When the TV is on, or if you have the PVR and it is recording, you will loose around 3.5mbps throughput speed.

So the faster the connection you have the better browsing and tv quality you will recieve.

Hope this helps

Jamie

There is QOS, it is managed by the crappy Siemens router which uses two VCs on the ATM side, one internet and one TV.

Finding a router that can do the same will make me happy because the Siemens is absolute guff.

My 2wire is miles better but was not designed for the dual VC system. On internet downloads the 2wire is over 100Kbytes/s faster than the Siemens. (~1 Meg faster)

The 8MB bandwidth for your internet is reduced when watching TV, which in theory should not have issues with contention, but in practice does. Peak times 6pm to 7:30pm can cause picture break up, although for me this has almost ceased. (It could have been temporary for maintenance)

I have not experienced lip-sync problems, but the Aspect ratio one is annoying. It can happen when a reminder pops up on to your screen, causing the program to lose its ratio.

All in all it's ok, if you have a simple home net you probably wont know the difference.
Hope this helps.

My auntie has this and when someone else does something through the interent that requires alot of bandwidth (watch a video on YouTube) Then the picture can sometimes start to become choppy.

Addendum:

Every now and then I get problems receiving UHF22 (ITV/C4/etc) via my aerial, so I can't receive the relevant channels on my TV or other PVRs. I see that the Tiscali+ box automatically receives them via IPTV when the over-air signal is missing, you don't have to tell it to.

parthena