Personally I use a non-SKY or FREESAT box, not bothered about HD...
The box has a cardslot so I can watch FTV and FTA.. The ONLY problem is that you can't activate a SKY FTV card in a non-sky box, but there's lots about already activated or just buy a cheapo box from a carboot/ebay and sell it on for the same price..
My DVB-S box though does have a few extra features which I suppose is why I have it instead of an easier to use freesat box and that is ethernet which I can stream media from the PC and also stream broadcasts to the PC.. Also I have twin (not dual) LNB's (used to have a motorised dish but it's too much of a pain) with the 2nd LNB pointing towards another sat (the box does disecQ switching or motorcontrol)
If though I was starting up and wanted an easy to use box it would be FREESAT, if though I already had a full Sky system and wanted to go FTV then I'd stick with the Sky system.. You could though run both if you so desired with a dual/quad LNB (depends on PVR or not)
---------- Post added at 11:12 ---------- Previous post was at 11:07 ----------
Quote:
Originally Posted by GeoffW
I'm thinking of using my old Sky box to get Freesat Free to Air channels.
Can anyone confirm whether this will work without buying the £20 sky card? I'd understood the card is only required to decrypt a couple of FTV channels. So if I have no card can I still get BBC and ITV without getting prompted to insert my card the whole time.
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The Sky FTV list is full accesable via the £20 card But suprised they're still selling them as the ONLY ones I believe are still encrypted are SKY3, Five Life (Fiver), Five US and Setanta Sports News (is that last one still running?), but a lot of channels which FREESAT uses are not programmed into a SKY box.. BUT depending on the box and the engineers menu there has been people who have manually programmed in the other channels BUT this is a long and thankless task and if the channels change they will not update. In the end Sky is fighting a losing battle with FTV and FREESAT will eventually win.