Monthly Archives: April 2021

A look at the Sky HD Guide (2008 era)

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Since Sky had launched its digital service back in 1998, very little had changed form its Sky Guide interface. Whilst numerous software upgrades were deployed that added certain features and altered the background, the menu structure and user interface remained the same thought-out. Unfortunately when the HD era rolled around, it was clear a new EPG and menu system had to be designed to accommodate the higher resolutions that HD offered.

Even though SkyHD launched in 2006,the software seen below wasn’t deployed until 2009, so existing HD boxes used a modified version of the old Sky+ guide with HD support.

Starting Up

The message banners have had a new colour design, gone is the yellow and blue in favor of white and blue.

The obligatory telephone line nag screen

The search and scan banner has been redesigned to accommodate the extra resolution offered by HD

Now its possible to see what’s on now, next and later, with the option to scroll forward upto 6 hours

You can now view information for future programs, and programs broadcast on other channels

Message that appears when asked to check your viewing card

Channels that don’t offer digital text will display this message, informing the user to access analogue text via their tv remote

When a program is about to start thats in your persdonal planner, you will be informed via the on scrren message,

TV Guide

The main TV guide screen has been revamped. Gone is channel genre list, which has been replaced with a tab-like view of genres that allows for the EPG to be filtered.

Selecting a future program gives you an option to set a reminder for this single program, or to add a series link. This differs from the older EPG, where you would add the program and would then enable the Series Link option.

Anytime

Sky’s answer to Virgin Media’s Video On Demand service, which used the reserved hard drive space of the Sky+ drive to load ‘Push’ on demand content. Despite only having 140Gb of storage

Sadly the Anytime Push service has been axed in favor of Sky On Demand, which is delivered via a broadband connection.

The best part of Anytime. Unfortunately it does not give back the reserved diskspace.

Planner

The Sky+ Planner, which shows programs that have been recorded.

Unfortunately playing back recordings requires the use of a viewing card, which the current box is unable to read.

Contents of the planner can be sorted by alphabetical, or grouped by unwatched but recorder, or anything that has already been viewed.

Box Office

Still no sign of life for Sky Box Office, which was axed in 2016.

Interact(ive)

Not much to see here except for one last remaining service. Does it load?

Oh well…

Here’s a service that does load, BBC Red Button

Meanwhile on Sky News…

Radio

Radio channels had their owns section in this EPG, however still no genres

Search

Options

The Services menu from the previous Sky Guide has been split into two, Options and Settings. Probably because the EPG design does not allow for a submenu to be under another menu.

General Sky+ Settings, you can add padding to the start and end of a program

Language and subtitles, not much has changed from the previous EPG

You will notice when you move the cursor down to the bottom half, the background colour changes to indicate it has been selected.

Favorite channels

Adding channels has not changed in regards to the previous Sky Guide, you are still limited to two symbol rates

Anytime can be turned off, but does not reclaim the disk space, Mini TV can also be disabled, extending the guide interface

Settings

Seems to be doing a good job considering there’s no signal strength

Installer Menu

Single feed mod optimizes the HD box to work off one feed, useful if you only have one feed from a dish or multiswitch however you cannot wewatch and record one program at the same time.

Error Messages

Conclusion

Overall its a mostly well designed EPG with a lot of much needed improvements to bring it in line with system that Virgin Media and BT offer. The introduction of the mini TV in the guide was a welcome addition,

Whilst the new software takes better advantage of the Sky HD digibox hardware, it does fall into the trap of being too cluttered, sometimes getting stuck of confused as to where you are on screen. Whilst Sky had tried hard to make the colours stand out, they are just different shades of blue, which can get repetitive. Also the tab interface could be better designed, since it looks separate to the main TV listings area, with a slight gap between the two sections.

ONdigital User Interface

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Switch On….

ONdigital was the first Digital Terrestrial platform in the world, and was to be a subscription service to compete with Sky analogue. Sadly it wasn’t to last as ONdigital entered administration in April 2002. The boxes themselves continued to work with the FTA Freeview service until 2011 when the transmissions were broadcast using 8K FFT, which the ONdigital boxes did not support.

The ONdigital guide software was developed using Canal+ Mediahighway middleware, alongside the NHEG5 virtual machine for digital text services. Mediaguard was used for the conditional access system.

Now & Next

ONdigital

Appears when you change channels, it cannon be called up by a button on the remote, you would use the Info button for now & next

The red dot means no signal

Ondigital channel list

Pressing OK brings up a channel list, that can be used to jump to certain channels

Ondigital Info

Pressing info gives a now and next view on what’s currently being broadcast, you can select different channels but can only see now & next.

Main Menu

Ondigital Main Menu

The main menu

Setting the Timer

ONDigital timer

ONdigital lacked an EPG, it had only now & next and that was it. If you wanted to record a program in the future you had to manually set it. ONdigital did provide a monthly magazine that gave TV listings for all of their channels which could be used to track the TV listings.

Its worth mentioning that Teletext, BBC, ntl, and ONview (ONdigital) offered MHEG service that broadcasted a TV guide, but this could not be used to set a reminder.

Favourite Channels

Favourite channels worked differently comparted to Sky or cable, you could mark as many channels as you wanted as a favorite, symbolized by a heart icon. However when the favorite channels settings was on, the Chan+ and Chan- would only scroll through favorite channels list only.

ONdigital favourite channels

Whilst we are here, might as well look at the ONdigital era channel list, it seems the original owner never bothered to rescan the box after Freeview launched, and did not rescan it either after ONdigital rebranded to ITV Digital.

Parental Lock

ONdigital parental lock

Not much to see since I don’t know the smartcard PIN, but from memory you can lock certain channels.

Update: Managed to find the default PIN code, now we can see whats in the menu

Here you can lock individual channels from being accessed by marking them with the lock symbol, you can then press the green button to activate the locks. When you try to enter a channel you will be prompted to enter the PIN number to unlock.

You can change the PIN code to whichever you choose.

If you change the PIN back to 0000, the menu option changes to Enter new parental code instead of change parental code, and you are prompted to set a PIN code.

Viewing Preferences

ONdigital viewing preferences
ONdigital box settings
ONdigital tv video settings
ONdigital modem settings

Getting Started

ONdigital getting started
ONdigital channel list
ONdigital channel list
ONdigital add channels

ONdigital Updates

ONdigital updates
ONdigital smartcard

Smart Card data, shows when the current entitlements expire. it appears this card was in use until the demise of ITV Digital

ONdigital postbox

The postbox, designed to receive broadcast messages, this was never used

Technical Information

Ondigital technical information
ONdigital signal strength

Signal strength, you have to manually enter the channel number to find out

ONdigital signal strength
Ondigital Nokia

Information relating to the manufacturer, software version and hardware revision

ONdigital technical information

Hidden information menu, not much to do except to view certain debug information

Guide: ONMail

ONMail

Pressing the guide button brings up this menu

ONMail

ONmail was ONdigital’s email service that could be accessed through the set-top box, using a remote and a receiver that plugs into the serial port on the ONdigital box.

ONMail

A PIN is required to access the service, since the PIN number on the card is unknown, we are unable to progress past this point.

ONMail

Not that we’d get any further, the servers were shut off shortly after ONdigital entered administration.

ONMail
ONMail
ONMail

Update: Managed to get further

Misc

The menu from a Bush IDTV, here you can see some changes. Various references to ONdigital have been removed with option six being renamed to subscription information, and the ON logo being removed from the top left of the screen. This must be due to the change from ONdigital to ITV digital

Sky Interactive – Part 1

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A look at Sky’s interactive services offered in 2002, back when interactive TV was a thing

Also can’t mention Sky interactive without the Red button dude, who’s sole purpose was to promote Sky interactive services by pressing your red button, even though that only worked on a Sky channel.

sky guide interactive

Interactive Menu

sky gamestar

Sky Gamestar

Sky’s interactive game service

sky gamestar cartoon network

Sky Gamestar – Cartoon Network

A dedicated section of gamestar with games based on Cartoon Network shows

sky interactive dominos pizza

Domino’s Pizza

At one time you could order Pizza through your Sky Digibox

sky active 2003

Sky Active

sky active 2001

Sky Active

The Classifieds and info section, for local jobs and marketplace

sky cinema listings

Cinema Listings

View and book local listings, this only worked with Odeon cinemas, which was useless because there were no Odeon cinemas in my area.

sky active sky+ domino's pizza

Adverts

Sky used to advertise their services and competitions whilst interactive screens were loading

Lovetomeet

A dating service that relied on the internal modem

sky interactive hsbc

HSBC

Before internet banking there was Interactive TV banking, again I only saw HSBC and LLoyds TSB being supported, other banks were not on the service

sky movies

Sky Movies

Exclusive to the Sky Movie channels, shows local cinema listings and to purchase DVD’s, a nice feature of this service was you could see behind the scenes clips from moves.

Sky active mobile

Your Mobile

Download ringtones, logos and custom voicemail, back when ringtones were polyphonic (think Nokia 3210, Ericsson T28s)

Sky active shopping

Sky Active: Shopping

Home shopping was considered to be a main feature of interactive TV, since customers could see the items themselves. Sky allowed a range of retailers to have presence on interactive, and even had their own storefront, SkyBuy

Sky marketplace

Marketplace

Some sort of eBay/Gumtree service, customers could buy and sell locally

Sky News Active

Sky News Active

Activated by the red button, a very useful service where you can browse news headlines, view ‘Active Channels’ which were small channels dedicated to certain subjects or headline coverage. These could also be tuned in using the Other Channels feature, bypassing the service

Sky Movies Active

Sky Movies Active

This is where you could see the behind the scenes stuff from movies, similar to bonus scenes on DVD’s

Sky Winzone

Sky Winzone

Sky Active 2002

Sky Active

Another view of the main Sky Active home screen

Interactive today

Sadly Sky axed most of their interactive services, so here is the interactive menu that you are left with

Does it work? Well…

It seems the only OpenTV interactive TV services available is BBC Red Button and the S4C language changer, none of which use the modem/return path. I’m not sure if the services offered on Sky Q are the same, I believe it’s mostly Netflix/Prime type of applications that are video on demand services.

Restoring a Thomson SkyHD box

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I’ve been meaning too document the HD era of Sky for some time now and whilst I do have a HD Sky box (the DRX595), I’m interested in the early era of SkyHD.

The HD EPG has been through multiple iterations, first it launched with an upscaled version of the Sky Guide interface that graced many Digibox’s since 1998. Sky redesigned the EPG exclusively for the HD boxes in 2008, which is the EPG I’m currently interested in below, unfortunately the majority of all HD boxes run newer versions of Sky HD guide, all except for one

Thomson DS8215

Thomson DSI8215

This was the launch STB for Sky HD, and remained the only box until 2008 when Sky started sourcing from Pace, Amstrad and Samsung, and were the only boxes that had analogue HD outputs (Component/YPbPr). Whilst the other boxes continued to receive updates after 2011, Sky began to phase out the Thomson models, which remained on the 8.3.2 EPG, and was the last OpenTV based EPG.

Admittedly Thomson were not the best manufacturer of Sky digibox’s. Don’t get me wrong, they’re mostly fine but nearly all Thomson (and Grundig, more on that later) digibox fall suspect of faulty PSU capacitors, which can cause myriad of issues from being stuck in standby to no satellite signal, and the HD box was sadly no exception to this.

First Impression

The box seemed to have been in use for a few years, and has had a bit of wear and tear.

Well it looks OK so far…

Seems to have had a lot of dust and grime build up over the past few years from the previous owner

The hard drive seems to have taken the brunt of it all, since there is a fan situated right below it that serves as the air intake.

Yeesh…

At this point I figured I had to take the box outside and clean it with a can of compressed air to get the dirt out.

Power Supply

A common issue on Thomson SkyHD (and Sky+/Digibox’s) is the power supply capacitors failing, all thanks to capacitor plague. This isn’t unique to Thomson Sky boxes as it can affect Grundig models as well, Thankfully it’s fixable even in 2021 either by yourself or you can send it off to be repaired. You can see in the above picture that one of the capacitors has started leaking, whilst others are bulging slightly.

This can also affect other consumer electronics from the 1999-2006 era, notably the clock capacitor on the original Xbox and various PC motherboards.

This box specifically had issues finding a satellite signal, and would only display ‘no Satellite signal is being received’ on both tuners, respective of either single or dual feed being used. Also a audible whine could be heard from the power supply, which is usually not a good sign.

The replaced capacitors

Conclusion

its worth mentioning that Sky no longer support this box for HD channels, whilst SD subscription channels and HD Free-To-Air channels will work, HD subscription channels will not work, since Sky moved to a different card pairing method this this box does not support, still for Freesat or basic subscription use the box will continue to work. The box also does not support any catch-up or On demand services offered by Sky.

Another thing to mention with this box is it will no longer recognize any viewing cards, this is probably due to fault with the box, either the card reader has failed or the contacts are dirty. This makes it impossible to use it with Sky+ modes since they require a Sky+ reenabled viewing card to work.

With this in mind I may decide to change the hard drive for a dummy Sata-SD card adaptor, since it makes no since having a hard drive that wont be used. I’m not sure what HDD space requirements the box has, since the box likes to reserve 140Gb for Anytime use.

Size Comparison

The Thomson SkyHD box was quite large compared to the previous set top boxes Sky have deployed, lets see how it compares:

Vs Xbox

Vs ntl: box

Vs Pace Digibox

Vs Virgin Media Tivo