Sky TV users - need advice

[tosca925]

I am moving and will be moving to a not Virgin Media area. I am going to have Sky TV fitted and maybe the broadband as well.

I would like a HD box fitted abut also may one or possibly two extra set top boxes. To cut costs to start with i may just want to have one box fitted.

How easy is it to add as econd box at a later date?

Do you have to go back to Sky for the extra box or can you buy them from else where ? Even Ebay?

THe house is a new build and does have points in every bedroom and also has the facility to root the sky box picture around the house to all these rooms ( so the builder tells me)( but having never used Sky am i unsure as to how to get up and running?

ANy advice and help grealty appreciated.

[NickJones]

The installation of a second box is presumably just a case of cabling - I can't see how the satellite signal or receiving equipment could differentiate how many boxes are on the end of it, so you could probably get away with one from ebay plus a few wires and splitter boxes from Maplin.

This is purely theorising, and not fact-based so don't trust me!

If you do go for getting Sky to do all the installations, I think you'll find it cheaper to get it done all in one go, as part of what you're paying for is the engineer call-out.

[plexer]

If at all possbile just get them to fit a quad lnb when the put up the dish.

This will then give you the possibility of 4 normal sky receivers or 2 sky+ receivers or 1 Sky+ and 2 normal receivers, same goes for HD as that is sky+ too

Ben

[Gatt]

Info on Sky MultiRoom from here...

[Joedetic]

Don't forget that you need one of those card thingies to use the skybox.

I didnt think multiroom was all that expensive tbh. I can't remember the price off the top of my head, but i doubt it's gonna be much.

[NickJones]

If you bought the box off ebay it would probably come with the viewing card in it, though. IIRC, Multiroom is £10 a month, unless you're paying the full whack subscription when it's free.

[Scotmk]

We got a wireless video sender, and now with just an extra sky remote we can watch sky upstairs (same channel) but I cannot be in 2 places at once.

Otherwise multiroom is the way to go if you wanna watch different channels £10 extra per month.

[russdev]

you get (or you did anyway) multiroom free if you get either sky sports or movies.

aka get multiroom pay 10 quid or get say sky sports pay 10 quid for that and they weaver the 10 quid multiroom charge.

Russ

[plexer]

I have a coax connection from the RF2 on my downstairs sky box to bedroom upstairs. The have an IR eye between that and tv to send remote commands donwstairs.

I have the sky box plugged into a hdd/dvd recorder as I'm too cheap to have sky+ the one output of this is plugged into the tv and the other output into a video sender.

The video sender receiver is plugged into the scart on the tv in the bedroom so that we can watch/control the hdd box from upstairs if we remember to take the remote.

The second scart connection on the tv has a linux powered satellite box plugged into it.

This sat box is connected to a motorised satellite dish at the bottom of the garden.

This other sat box also has a 200gb hard drive in it for pvr functions.

The composite out from the sat box is plugged into the hdd/dvd recorder so that selecting it's input sends that sat feed to the video sender.

Finally the Wii is plugged into the TV's composite in connectors.

Cue spaghetti.

Ben

That's alot of RF and composite cables. Don't use anything less than RGB Scart here. Otherwise Component / HDMI

[plexer]

Trouble is lack of scarts etc...

Sky box is plugged into tv and other output into hdd/dvd recorder, hdd/dvd recorder actually plays back through sky bok into tv.

Main use i.e sky and hdd/dvd recorder is scart so that's fine.

Oh and I forgot the vhs which I think is rf cable to tv.

Ben