my parents have been members of sky for 20 years!! but Sky are refusing to give them any discount on a sky+ box!

I think freesat would be a much better option, but they dont have a HD TV so the Humax £300 model is a bit costly, is there an non-HD freesat recorder on the market?

I thought it was £99?, a 50% discount.


No there's not.

Sky members? I'm not sure Sky would consider your parents to be members of anything. I think they would be considered subscribers.

well you know what I meant

so let me get this straight the cheapest freesat recorder is £300 wheras you can get a freeview one for £50!

Do you intend to stop subscribing to Sky? Because if you do, a few months worth of subscription would buy a nice new Humax Freesat PVR. I think you need to look beyond the cost of the hardware.

I think the big questions to answer are

1) What channels do they want / need - you / they can then decide if feesat as the range of channels required

2) Is the recorder function essential ?

2) Can they get freeview - as an alternative the freeview boxes are cheaper but offer some different channels



The Sky+ box is currently £99 reduced from £199 for existing customers who take out a new 12 contract

For Humax we would have wanted any box we developed to support the future network connectivity, this means supporting technologies which would set the price difference between SD and HD quite small. So small in fact that it hardly be worth buying the SD version let alone us putting effort into developing and supporting it.

We will continue to review the position, but at this time the HD PVR is the best proposition for us. I have little doubt that other manufacturers will address this market if they feel it is worthwhile to do so.

Bob from Humax

Maplin has a £50 SD only freesat box. It even has a USB port for recording! The manual for it is typically Chinese though so I wasn't able to really judge how well the recording function would work.

I have been trying to get some help in putting together a feature comparison between the different available Freesat+ boxes - there's an editable Excel spreadsheet based on data from Maplin here:

http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?k...UOUp5pTg&hl=en

Except it's not going to be a Freesat box - so why try and give the impression it is?.

I apologise - the box (presumably) receives the Freesat channels but is not a Freesat box because it probably does not seamlessly record directly from a 7 day EPG. It's hard to tell but you would probably have to select a reminder for a given channel then tell the box to record at the programme's time separately. If interested I would ask a shop if they will let you try one out.

Most non freesat PVRs need recordings to be set in the same way as you used to set VCRs - i.e. Channel, start time, end time etc. The only EPG most will have is a "now and next". A PVR without a full 7 day EPG is NOT a true PVR. There are exceptions to the 7 day EPG on non freesat boxes such as the Fortec Star receivers.

Bear in mind that the Fortec Star boxes only have 1 tuner, so you can't watch one channel and record another. Also, you can't record a channel while watching a recording.

Again, this is where you are confusing yourself, there are no Freesat 'channels' - Freesat is just an EPG. The box displays 'FTA' channels, using it's own EPG as a simple and easy to use interface.

The Maplin boxes are mostly just common FTA boxes.