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Moving to a house shortly which is on Virgin cable and thinking about subscribing. However, am I right in thinking that we won't be able to use our freeview PVR to record the Virgin output, and would have to fork out an extra £5 per month for one of their boxes?
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yes you are right.
The same would also apply if it were sky as well.
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>> yes you are right.
>>
>> The same would also apply if it were sky as well.
Although you can use the sky dish to view Freesat, with an appropriate TV set or PVR.
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You are correct. There would be ways of rigging things up, but the EPG wont be usable, therefore defeating the whole advantage of the PVR.
Options
Use the existing or a newly installed terrestrial aerial
Get the V+ box. It is actually pretty good.
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Although both are digital services your freeview PVR will not work with Virgin cable.
So if you want to record, the easiest option is their V+ box.
If you have unlimited fast internet, you could use iPlayer, or other ipTv offerings.
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Thanks folks. It's either £36 for Virgin phone/broadband/TV (inc. the V+ box) or £19 for TalkTalk phone/broadband (with 40Gb cap) + freeview; I'm leaning towards the latter at the moment.
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check the postcode of the new place for
a: Broadband availability / TV over the net services
b: Freeview reception ability.
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Check the new place already has a BT phone line in for Talk Talk - if was previously Virgin cable it might not have one?
Dunno how much getting one installed might be but I bet it's not tuppence.
Edit: go back to sleep Crankcase. I see Talk Talk have covered that on their site.
Stand down.
Last edited by: Crankcase on Mon 25 Oct 10 at 10:29
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>> check the postcode of the new place for
>>
>> a: Broadband availability / TV over the net services
Predicted speed came out at 14Mb IIRC when I checked it yesterday; not sure what you mean by TV over the net services? Are you suggesting using that for 'normal' TV?
>> b: Freeview reception ability.
Only about a mile from where we are now where it seems to be pretty good, but I'll check.
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>> Predicted speed came out at 14Mb IIRC when I checked it yesterday; not sure what
>> you mean by TV over the net services? Are you suggesting using that for 'normal'
>> TV?
BT / Tiscali Talk Talk offer TV over the net services similar to Sky/Virgin
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>> BT / Tiscali Talk Talk offer TV over the net services similar to Sky/Virgin
Ah, ok - but I don't want to have to faff around getting the TV signal from the PC to the TV, which I would have to do with BT/TT, wouldn't I?
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BT Vision Box next to the TV and 'ethernet over mains' back to the router.
The older boxes were not the most reliable - suffering lockups, but do not know about the latest incarnation. The HD recording function off air seems to work well enough, which is all I use it for.
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Virgin broadband is the best in the business!
Well, for asymmetric home user lines anyway...
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>>...not sure what you mean by TV over the net services?
>> Are you suggesting using that for 'normal' TV?
I had meant it as a substitute for locally held recordings, but there is much more than just "catch up" available that way.
Video Over I.P. may turn out to be the future for television, but we've had the discussion before, and that view isn't held by all here.
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Sign up for Virgin media through Quidco and you get £65 back... www.quidco.com/virgin-media/
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>> Sign up for Virgin media through Quidco and you get £65 back...
Yes, thanks, I'd seen that. But £36 per month still seems like too much.
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I'm now liking the look of O2's 'All Rounder' - 20Mb (predicted speed 14Mb) unlimited broadband + basic phone package for £19.50 per month inc. line rental. No need to go for a better phone package because we can continue using cheap calls provider 18185 apparently, who we currently use to keep our BT bill down.
Will also need to get a free O2 sim to become a registered O2 user - £10 topup I guess. FWIW O2 have won various ISP awards - I looked at Orange, but their broadband service appears to have a poor reputation.
Any O2 broadband users out there?
Last edited by: Focus on Wed 27 Oct 10 at 17:07
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Ordered the O2 package for the (haunted!) new place today, although it wasn't as easy as I hoped it would be, and there was a sting in the tail.
I used the 'are you moving home' link, so it asked all the right questions about old and new address, when are you moving, warned that I needed the line activating etc. But then it asked for a card number so it could verify my address. Unfortunately it tried to verify that the card was associated with the new address ie. where the phone/broadband will be. Seemed daft.
Solved by changing one of my cards' address to the new one and trying again - hopefully that's ok, and I'll mention it to our seller when we pop round on Sunday for a recce.
The sting was right at the end when it asked me to pick a date for the engineer to come round to activate the line. The earliest date available was 1 week after we move in (which is in 2 weeks time), so we will be without a landline or (more importantly) internet connection for 7 days. Disaster! Might invest in a Vodafone mobile broadband dongle, £25 for 3Gb, to at least allow everyone to do some emailing and browsing.
Oh and the other thing is that we can't take our landline number with us - different exchange, despite being same area code and only about a mile away from where we are now. But it probably explains why the predicted download speed is 7x our current speed. so it's not all bad.
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If you're getting a different number then being without the landline shouldn't be too bad. We used a USB dongle for Internet access when we moved because I first needed the line active and then I had to wait for an Openreach engineer slot to get the install done for the broadband etc. All in all more than a week.
We were going to get the number from the old house (still assigned to us despite being inactive for a few months) but that was going to delay things even more. I was told the line had to be active, then the phone number switched and then broadband could be ordered. So we went with a new number in the end. Our old one had been disconnected for some 6 months then anyway.
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Virgin TV - recording - diddy1234
