December 2008

Sky boxes behaving badly......

In the past 3-4 weeks we have been having an odd problem with our Sky box, & this may well be one that others out there have had too.

It's quite simple - the box has been switching itself to standby automatically. Though this is obviously a good thing due to there being a bit of a power saving it's extremely annoying to those of us who rely on the box being on in order to record things to an external recorder &/or download EPG information from the likes of Guideplus+ (http://www.europe.guideplus.com/ ).

Anyway, thanks to those useful people on the Total France forum I have found out that Sky have been updating ordinary box software over recent weeks & that many boxes now have the option of "Auto Standby" (Sky+ users have had this option since 2007). The only problem with this change is that the default setting is "On", & after 2 hours of not having any activity from the remote after 23.00 it goes to sleep. This led us to think our box had a fault. Anyway, it's very easily set to "Off" via option 5 on the "Services" menu.

There's a forum thread about the whole thing here on Total France.

We were very glad to solve this puzzle, as the festive season would have been a bit glum if it was filled with constant recriminations about why programmes hadn't been recorded.......

Channel 4 - update

It's slightly old news now, but things have moved on since my post of in the "TV - satellite" section on April 29th 2008.

Sky now carry Channel 4 as a Free To Air channel. so any Sky box will pick it up, even without a card. As mentioned before, I'm sure Five will be following suit in the near future.