V+ Good News, Bad News

Another week of getting to know V+. I don't remember if I mentioned it, but we had a briefly frustrating game of "Hunt the BBC iPlayer" the other day. The answer is that from the main menu, it's 2,2,1. It took a while, though. I looked in the manual and found an alternative way of getting there - but it was James that bagged the 221 solution. OK...

Good News: Old Skool VCR - this week, I wanted to do a bit of Old Skool timer recording. We wanted to record the Government press conference on the BBC News channel. As far as I know, there aren't discreet programmes on this channel - it's just 24x7 news. So I wanted to record from 2pm to 4pm in order to catch the bit we wanted somewhere in that window. V+ lets you do that - you can specify date, start and stop times and channel to record - just like a VCR. Very cool - just works. I'm pretty sure Sky+ can't do that.

Bad News: Jumpy Luther - this week, we recorded LUTHER in HD. The recording was choppy. There were times when it froze for a second, and then continued - so it jumped, and crucial pieces of dialogue were lost. It persisted. The recording became unwatchable. :( Very disappointing. We opted for the 221 solution - BBC iPlayer in HD saved the day! :) This was absolutely perfect - just like watching it live - very impressed. I don't know why the recording went jumpy as it did - I don't think we were downloading or streaming anything in particular at the time - but we will have to keep an eye on this.

Performance

The graph says it all. Virgin Media is faster than Sky - end of.
Graph and measurement by James - thank you! :)

Life with Virgin Media - Week 1

Well - here we are after a week in the Wonderful World of Virginmedia. There are one or two happenings to report

SSL - I was briefly "tripped up" by the router. By default, SSL is blocked by the router. A small Gotcha.

Voicemail - I tried calling home whilst someone was on the phone over the weekend, and I got a voicemail service I didn't know I had! I'm going to have to explore this - see how it works. I'm not usually keen on these services, because often they don't have good ways of telling you that you've got a message. I disabled the Sky one.

Phone Number - I think VirginMedia have taken away my ex-directory number - I noticed that when I got a call from home here in the office, my number came up on the display instead of "UNKNOWN NUMBER". I think I'll let this go for the time being and see how it goes.

Router - I initially thought this was a crappy little black box, but after having explored its web interface and seen what you can do with it, I'm quite impressed. Connecting to it remotely seems very flaky - only works about one time in four - but that may be because of the SSL thing - I think I was trying remote access before I fixed the SSL thing.

Remote Control - a minor irritation for me on Sky was that the Sky+ remote control didn't seem to want to control the volume on my bog-standard Sony TV. The V+HD remote control lets me control volume, mute and power standby on my TV - happy about that! :)

Internet Performance - speed of Internet access is still consistently fast - I will put a graph up soon to prove this. One interesting thing, though - upload speed is crap compared to Sky. Since I only upload the odd small file by FTP to my own webspace, this isn't a problem. If you were some sort of massive upload junkie, I guess this might be a problem.

HD - we're starting to watch things in HD - and it's great - really good. Remember I said that most of what we end up watching tends to be on BBC and ITV? Well, most of it seems to be on BBC-HD and ITV1-HD!! We are becoming MainlyHD viewers! So we're not only getting the most benefit out of our TV, but also our ViriginMedia package. I need to do something about sound at some point soon - but I'm going to wait for the first broad release of HDMI 1.4 AV receivers first - hopefully later this year.

Tech Refresh - If you're interested, going VirginMedia is part of a slightly wider Tech Refresh. The plan is to reduce complexity, reduce devices and cabling - and improve functionality. So ditching the Sky+ box, redeploying the VCR/DVD-Recorder combi, and ditching the CD-Player in favour of a Bluray Player has made a huge difference. The house is now nearly a SCART-Free Zone. If acceptance testing of the Bluray Player continues to a successful conclusion, then I'll also ditch the XBMC. I'm hesitant about that step - there'll be LOTS of testing! I've now sorted out and tidied the cabling behind the TV, and it's a lot better now. I've got three things that are on 24x7 - always plugged in - and six things that are only powered up when necessary. So I'm saving as much electricity as possible and very few red lights or clocks. If I do go down the AV Receiver/5.1 route, I guess more headaches to come in that area!

Since I'm drifting off-topic, I'll stop there. Next time - graphs!