Receiving French TV on Eutelsat 5W

[richardg7vyi]

Recently French TV channels France 2,3,4 & O have moved off SD over to HD transmissions only. Can anyone tell me do you now need a receiver with a Fransat card to receive the HD versions or will a standard Free To Air HD receiver receive them OK without a card? None of our receivers are HD and havent't got one to test it with at present. Looking on Lyngsat pages it looks like they aren't encrypted.

[Oaktech]

I believe you just need an HD box, but you may find you need a twin LNB to feed it.

[richardg7vyi]

If they are PVR receivers I think they will. Maybe an issue as the language classrooms only have one LNB feed currently. Only affecting France TV at moment. German teachers seems to have plenty of SD content still on Astra and Hotbird.

[Oaktech]

I've just upgraded a friends parents (they're Italian) to an HD box and their new non PVR Humax pointed at 5w (mainly for RAI) required a dual LNB to work, other boxes may not!

[richardg7vyi]

Oh right. Thanks for that info. Will have to look at some boxes and see what input they require. Goal posts seem to keep moving all the time with Satellite. Channels moving frequency and modes and different receiver requirement.

[Michael]

I've received French channels off 5w Atlantic Bird for years - I'm already viewing them in HD, but you have two choices really -

 

Buy a HD Fransat box (with card, one off payment), or you can buy a Fransat card in a PCMCIA module (one off payment) and plug directly into the back of your TV (if it supports it). This is how I do it using my Samsung.

 

Alternatively you can get the same services using TNTSat (Astra 1 19.2e) by buying a TNTSat box, with card, valid for 4+ years.

[richardg7vyi]

OK thanks Michael. We've been using 5W for some years too but on SD. Its the recent move to HD and ceasing the SD transmission that means we've got to decide what receiver they need. I'm getting the languages department to discuss what they want to be able to receive. It looks to me like there are 3 or 4 FTA channels in HD but things like TF1 and some of the others are now encrypted only so you need the Fransat card for them.

[Michael]

I've never understood why a select few are unencrypted, but buying into a card gives you access to the whole library of French channels as before.

 

Again (I don't know why) Fransat is valid for a lifetime, yet TNTSat is valid for 4 years+ even though they're very identical services, be it on two different satellites!?

[richardg7vyi]

Yes it's strange. It's a bit like UK free sat. Some of the channels on that are encrypted by Sky but free to air on terrestrial. f the department wants a wider range of channels to use for teaching material they would be best getting the Fransat card. I know they mourned the loss of TF1 when that went off FTA and there is a wide range of channels on Fransat. We'll see what they want to do. Thanks for the information.