TV

I used to post a lot about TV and Sky in particular. It was mainly about options around having a home media centre. The commercial options around this have improved (things like the Apple TV and streaming) and the DIY options have become less interesting to talk about.

So it is nice to have something relevant to say again…

Disney+ now included

Disney+ has been available as an app on Sky for a while, but recently they announced it would be included with your Sky subscription. I don’t have a Sky subscription myself, though my dad does. I have my own Disney+ account. I’d previously logged into Disney+ on his Sky TV box.

When he heard about Disney being included, he launched the app, which was still signed in to my Disney+ account. It then automatically connected his Sky account to my Disney account. I had to contact Disney+ support to disconnect them.

It’s probably a good thing to make the account management so seamless, but in this case it caused problems. One thing I would say is the support experience to get it fixed was actually good. I contacted them at about 20:30 on a Saturday, there was no difficulty in explaining the issue and it was all resolved in about fifteen minutes.

Someone on the MythTV mailing list recently announced GMyth, a library based on ANSI C and GObject to provide access to Myth backends in a GTK environment. Their ultimate goal is to have MythTV accessible from a Nokia 770/N800 complete with live transcoding.

You can find lots more info over on MoRpHeUz’s Blog.

At the moment I have a Sky subscription with a Sky box. The Sky box outputs to my computer which is running Media Center which can change channel on the box using an IR blaster. This isn’t ideal and also means that I’ll never get HD since the Sky box only sends an SD signal out of the scart/composite output. Surely there must be a way to connect the computer directly to the computer and receive TV that way?

Well there is. But there are issues. Firstly you need a DVB-S card. These are just digital TV capture cards that you can plug the cable from a satellite dish into. If you stop there you will be able to receive all the free-to-air channels. Oddly enough though that won’t get you all the free channels.

To get the encrypted Sky channels you will need a CAM - Conditional Access Module - with a card reader. In theory you just put your card in and set up your DVB card to use it. Of course anything to do with decrypting commercial stuff is never that easy. You see there are many different encryption methods and most CAMs don’t support them all (and some only support one). What’s even worse is the method used by Sky is VideoGuard from a company called NDS (which is owned by News Corporation, the company which owns Sky). And guess what? You have to pay a license to use it. That doesn’t mean you can’t physically use it though. There are a couple of CAMs (literally two from what I’ve read) that can decrypt VideoGuard signals but the legality is questionable. Which is silly since generally speaking you’ll still have a (paid for) Sky subscription card in the reader.

The other issue is Sky’s Terms and Conditions on this issue. They say that the card must stay in the box the whole time, that you can’t use the card for unauthorised purposes and that the card needs to be paired to a specific box. However it doesn’t actually say you need to use a Sky box and the very first thing it says is that you are bound to the conditions once you put the card in the box. So surely if you never do that you aren’t bound to the conditions?

For anyone outside the UK, I’m referring to the digital TV broadcast by British Sky Broadcasting (if that is still their name).

They are stuffing far too many channels on there and as a consequence the quality is dropping. Before, you could occasionally see compression artefacts on the images, now they are everywhere. It’s especially noticeable with full screen changes when it’s dark. And once you know what it looks like it is impossible to ignore.

I have a scary theory though. Next year they are going to release SkyHD - basically Sky transmitting a High Definition signal. Now if they compress the channels the way they are now then it really won’t help since compression artefacts look worse at high resolutions. Unless the reason they are compressing channels is to fit higher bandwidth HD signals in. Or they could be doing it intentionally to exaggerate the gains from HDTV…