I had a bit of a scare last weekend when I noticed that my Sky+HD box had started missing recordings. Fortunately it was ok after a quick reboot, but I a bit of web searching and found on the very handy Digital Spy Sky HD forum that some of the Sky receivers made by Thomson have a nasty habit of their power supplies blowing up Fortunately a quick check under the hood of the box revealed that this wasn’t the problem. Phew! Kudos to Sky for not putting a warranty seal on the box so I could do this and still stay the right side of my warranty (still have 5 months left!).

The fix, it seems so far, was to turn off the somewhat dubious Anytime TV option, which downloads ‘recommended’ telly to your Sky box overnight. Unfortunately this telly is often (a) movie channels that I don’t subscribe to or (b) shit. So I wasn’t really going to miss it. Apparently this can cause some Sky boxes to fail recordings on the second receiver (e.g. not work when recording two things at once). So fingers crossed, I’ve fixed that for now.

Anyway that got me thinking about what the ‘perfect’ sky box would be – essentially Sky boxes are just PCs with a couple of Satellite tuner cards in them, running some custom software. (Of course that is also true of a vast array of home electronics now).

What would I like my Sky box to do, that it doesn’t now? I’ve made a list:

Record more channels at once. Yeah, sometimes two just isn’t enough – don’t blame me; its the evil TV schedulers that put everything I want to watch on at 9pm on a Sunday. This would be mitigated if I had some of the other features, like ‘work with iPlayer’ or indeed:

Find repeats of programs. Especially useful if you miss a program or have a recording clash, being able to suggest recording a repeat or the same program on a +1 channel would really help. I have to do this manually and even then often have to use the sky web-based TV guide or the iPhone based TiotiTV+ app which is very handy.

Better searching. Have you ever tried to find a program on the Sky box itself? It’s awful – you can’t actually search by program name but just get a rubbish A-Z list which means pages of shite, usually on channels you don’t care about. I usually don’t even both and just use web/iPhone app to find things. Search needs to improve a lot to get the most out of the sheer number of channels/repeats available. Searching just in your favorite channels would be good (as would having an unlimited number of favorite channels). Better caching of the program guide on the box would help hugely as paging through the schedule feels like using Teletext on an analog TV circa 1980… painfully slow and horrible.

Work with iPlayer / 4oD / ITV Player / etc. If you miss a program there are now plenty of legal ways to ‘catch up’ with it… but to use these you have to use a PC (ok, sometimes a Mac works too) and can’t watch it on your big telly unless you plug a PC into it (or have a little Mac mini under it as I do). I was very glad to see that Virgin’s V+ box now works with BBC iPlayer. Sky need to match this and ideally work with Channel 4 and ITV’s on demand services as well.

Better web interface. Kudos to sky for having a reasonable online TV guide (it does break about 50% of the time I try to use it) and even more for having Remote Record, so that I can get my Sky box to record something I’ve found on the web (TiotiTV+ uses this to allow remote record from the iPhone, which is dead handy). But it’s all very one-way. I can’t tell if I’ve already set something to record, so I can easily get recording clashes and not realise it. Ideally I want to be able to manage the recordings and series links from the web, so they need to have the Sky box actually talk to their servers to do this.

Use the freaking internet already! When Sky first launched I can see that they had to include a modem to allow the Sky box to send information back to them, but now does anyone really not have the internet at home? I seriously doubt anyone has a High Definition TV and Sky+ HD box and doesn’t have the internet. There is already an Ethernet socket on the back of the box, so why is it not being used? With this they wouldn’t need to plug the phone line in, could make use of iPlayer and other video-on-demand, could provide a local web interface / automation – lots of things. Just make use of the socket that you already have…

Streaming to other devices at home. Specifically I want to stream music/tv to an Apple Macbook in another room. I understand that there are some rights-management issues here, but I would be happy to trade some quality for the flexibility. Sky should bear in mind that as people can already download and decrypt channels using a DVB-S2 card, they won’t be making it ‘easier’ for people to ‘steal’ content by doing this. It’s already easy for people to do this. What they’re doing is making the produce that people pay money for better. Doing that means they’ll have more people paying money for it – the people who want to ‘steal’ it have plenty of ways to do that, so just ignore them. Just make the service better for the paying customers.

Use less power when on standby. I’m really not convinced about using 40 Watts in standby — that’s just awful. They need to power down the hard drive, switch the CPU into a lower power mode and switch off whatever they can. It’s really inexcusable.

Find programs I want to watch automatically. Series link is pretty useful, but only works for things that are on within the next week. There are plenty of US TV shows that go on a one month hiatus over Christmas, so it is easy to miss them when they come back. The Sky box should be able to keep a list of shows to always search for – even if they aren’t on in the next week. (If it currently does this, its hidden and thus useless). You could even set it to search for a particular episode across any channels – e.g. if you’ve missed one in a series, you may be able to find it repeated on another channel eventually.

Larger hard drive(s). As I’ve already spoken about, it is easy for people to ‘steal’ content so Sky should just allow people to use larger hard drives, making them user-upgradeable. Making use of the existing eSATA socket on the back would be a good idea here. Having future ‘high end’ boxes with more tuners and a RAID set up would be even better.

Better presentation. The onscreen program guide itself is functional, but the presentation of recorded programs is very poor – they should look at various home media software such as Boxee to see what should be done. You could display the summary of the show (which the box already has) and a thumbnail image (that again the box has) or even the series logo / series summary (which can be downloaded from teh internets).

Having thought about my list I’ve realised that most of it could be done with a software upgrade – something that I know Sky are working on as rumors of a new EPG have abounded for months. We’ll have to see if it is much of an improvement!

So in my nice new flat by the sea, I’ve swapped to a reasonably ‘green’ power supplier Southern Electric who can supply power from their hydro-electric power stations oop north, so it’s reasonably guilt free. However – it still costs money, green or not, so they also give you a power meter that tells you how many Watts you’re using, how many you’ve used over the last day, week and month. All very good and geeky – I like!

But, I was quite surprised how much power was being used overnight – 130 Watts! Even when a lot of stuff was supposed to be ‘off’. Fortunately the meter updates pretty quickly – about every 10 seconds – and so on Sunday morning I had a grand ‘switch off’ and then turned on just one thing at a time and built up a handy table of what power was being used on standby (or on if it would be left on, like the ADSL router).

• Oven 0
• Boiler 0
• Fridge 3
• iMac 15 plugged in – not on or asleep! Up to 130 on, 87-ish idle
• Bebox (ADSL/Wifi router) 10-12
• Apple Time capsule 45-28
• 6 way posh surge protected Ppower strip 31
• 6 way not so posh surge protected power strip 0
• Tv 105 on, 17 standby
• Sky HD 41 standby
• Xbox 15 standby
• Mac mini 14 just plugged in
• Wii 13 stdby
• network drive 11 just plugged in
• Av switch 0
• Remote charger 0 off 10 charging

A couple of BIG shocks in there for me:

• One 6 way adaptor took up 30 watts!!! That’s just mental – needless to say I swapped that out right away.

• I’d heard that TVs used up quite a bit of power on standby but I always assumed that was old TVs, not mine — how wrong I was, it eats up 15 watts on standby. Very naughty!
• Even naughtier were the computers that used up 15 watts each without even being turned on even slightly! Just being switched on at the socket, nowt else, 15 watts! I’ve got two computers so that’s another 30 watts I can get rid off just by turning things off at the socket.
• They Sky box is very naughty and just hoovers up power when supposedly ‘on standby’ – I know Sky would like me to keep this on overnight to download stuff, but it’s just too much, it’s going off overnight as that’s the same as leaving a 40 watt lightbulb on all night!
• However its not all bad – the fridge, oven, boiler and some chargers were actually pretty good and took either no or very little power when not in use. Hooray!

So, what have I done, armed with my new ‘power facts’? I’ve got most of my tech in one corner on a couple of power strips, so I’ve got a couple of new power strips that are surge protected BUT have a switch on each socket! So, I can keep various game consoles plugged in but not turned on, until I actually want them. I’ve also set it up so that I can turn off one of the power strips at the wall overnight, so the Sky box and TV don’t eat up power overnight.

For the Macs, I’ve found a useful widget that allows them to ‘deep sleep’ which is the same as ‘hibernate’ on Windows – it means I can save the state to disk and then turn the power off, and its still pretty fast to come back on when I need it. Not as quick as before – which was about 3 seconds, compared to about 30-40 seconds. But I can wait, when its saving so much power.

So now, I’m using about 80 watts less than before – even when everything’s on! Overnight I’ve saved two thirds of the power – about 120 watts! So I should only have about 20-30 watts overnight. That’s great, and all I have to remember to do is just turn off a switch overnight.

Anyway that’s my probably over long and dull post about saving power, money and the planet. Go out and get yourself a power meter and be shocked about how much your favorite gadgets are using!

So, I finally buy a flat and the interest rates go up. Typical!

But what’s worse – I stop working in Kingston and Apple open a new store there.

+

Argh!

Oh well it might be worth popping in this Saturday to enter their “sweepstake” competition for £1700 worth of Apple kit. Yummy!

Stuff like this Milestone video distribution system is why my dream tech lair includes plenty of Cat 5 cables for piping data, video and pretty much anything you like down it

The Milestone system lets you pipe video to multiple TVs from up to a mile away (eek… a bit unnecessary) and rather helpfully includes routing the remote control signals too. Cunning!

Posted as part of the Sunday Blog Blow-out!

In the “if I had infinite money” category of gadget lust, I present to you the DVDO iScan VP30, which is a nifty little box o tricks that takes any video signal known to man and scales it up to lovely crisp High Definition quality, to be shown on a very large HD projector (in my infinite money world, anyway). It’s retail price is a tiny bit under $2000… eek!

The neat trick is that you can plug existing s-video, composite, component or RGB sources into it, as well as newer high definition HDCP sources…. and it will scale them all!

For extra bonkersness, you can buy a package of a very high end DVD player & the iScan VP30 in a package with ‘SDI’ modification to get an extremely high quality digital connection between them. (SDI is what actual film/TV production companies use to move their video about the place). The ultimate in home DVD movie watching (sans speakers, amplifier or projector) for ‘just’ $2,899.

I just found this rather cunning alternative to a home wireless network. It’s a very simple adapter that allows you to send data down your home power network, at “85Mbps” speeds. That compares rather well to the (equally fictional) 54Mbps speed of WiFi (802.11g). (flash presentation)

It’s also much harder to hack into, and won’t interfere with an existing WiFi install. I have a feeling that this would work very well for connecting up all the ‘under the TV’ kit, instead of using up precious WiFi bandwidth for kits (consoles, remote music players) that never move, so don’t really need a wireless connection – there are plenty of wires there already!

Also, using power lines solves the problem that WiFi does tend to have going through walls – especially in 100-year-old apartment blocks like the one I live in!

Why bother? Why not just use WiFi for everything – the problem is that the radio spectrum is a limited resource, so every additional device on the network chops up the available bandwidth. So if, Bobble is trying to open a 50Mb image at the same time as I’m playing an online game, both tasks will have to share the same bandwidth, and will be slower.

It’s also not too expensive at about £120 for a pair.

If I wasn’t in a “saving money” mode I would go out and buy one right now – oh well, fingers crossed on that lottery ticket tonight, eh?

(product page, review, shop page)

technorati tags: wifi, powerline, ethernet, home, network, dLAN