PlayTV vs Freesat HD vs BT vision

I only really have room for one box connected to my HDTV and I have three thoughts of what to get.
The BT is a PVR (i think) and can get setanta to watch football, but it has no HD. The big bonus is that it is free with my internet.

The Freesat meanwhile is a PVR but only comes with one HD channel and for £150 that is pretty steep as I never watch shopping channels.

Finally the PlayTV has the ability to turn my PS3 into a PVR and in the crave article about it, seems to have the ability to take HD in the future. For around £100 this seems good value.

I was just wondering what the best choice would be if I am looking to get HD channels but not pay inormous amounts for subscription services. Thanks.

p.s- those figures are in pounds stirling- there is an A in front for some reason.

Hi kingchris, welcome along.

I've got BT Vision, and I have to say I've had trouble with it. Maybe newer boxes are more reliable, but mine crashes a lot. The on-demand video is very high-quality, though - if they get a better selection on there, it'll be much better than schlepping down to the video store.

The Humax freesat box is pretty expensive and doesn't even let you record. There aren't many HD channels, and you need a dish as well. Probably worth waiting a while for an HD PVR to come out at a reasonable price.

PlayTV isn't out till September, as far as I can gather, and the first generation of hardware may not support HD. Sony is tight-lipped on whether it will record TV while you're playing a game - which suggests it just can't do that.

I'd say if you're on BT, Vision is worth a go, but don't expect too much of it as a PVR.

I have BT Vision and I've been pretty happy with it so far. I have a very early box and haven't had any trouble with crashes at all. (Edit: Should note I've had BT Vision since Feb 2007)

Occasionally the PVR plays up and the recording is a bit dodgy, but that's more down to my freeview signal being crap than anything else.

The On-Demand stuff is good quality, and there's quite a bit of free BBC stuff on there (Doctor Who etc.) although not as much as the iPlayer. Apparently there will be more iPlayer BBC stuff soon.

BT Vision does support HD (although it doesn't receive any HD broadcasts... at least until HD is on freeview in 2009-12). I have the box connected to my TV via HDMI and to my surround sound via Optical Out. The user interface is presented in 720p and the box does a very good job of upscaling freeview (much better than my Samsung TV's built in freeview receiver).

I am thinking of getting a freesat card for my PC to record HD content with a view to streaming this to my TV via an XBox 360. Not sure how feasible this is yet though.

BT vision is probably your best option at this point as you're already with them for broadband, but if you are prepared to switch broadband and home phone providers, there's Tiscali TV.

For £20 per month you get 8Mb broadband, phone line rental and video on demand via a Tiscali box, which also doubles as a Freeview receiver. For a one-off payment of £50, they throw in a PVR too. No idea if it's any good, but it's worth bearing in mind.

As for your other options, there are no Freesat PVRs yet, and you can only get BBC HD anyway, which isn't worth paying £150 for a box.

Apparently, Sony said the Play TV is ready for HD broadcasts, but I would take that with a pinch of salt. It would need HD to be broadcast over Freeview, which is years away, so it's not an option for now.

If you're dead set on HD, other options are Sky HD, which works out very expensive, as to get a decent number of HD channels you have to pay for the Films and/ or the Sports packages, plus another £10 per month on top.

There's also some HD content on Virgin Media

Hi there

I have the Humax Freesat box and it is exellent.
I also have Freeview.
I had Sky HD but have just cancelled as you only seem to get REPEATS all the time and at £48.00 per month it is very expensive just to watch mostly repeats plus the SKY boxes are very noisy and slow down so that they need rebooting all the time.
My Humax box has not crashed once and HD picture on BBC HD is FANTASTIC as they use a different stream to the sky one?.
Plus it is very fast in everything it does.
ITV HD is coming shortly which you will not get on SKY? nor on freeview and believe you not when you have watched HD need i say more.
The Humax will pay for itself if you add up the SKY subs for three months.???
Go for the Humax you wont regret it.
PS :-
You can also get LUX HD on the Humax Box.When you do a manual tune plus a load of Free Channels already on the sky platform.

Regards

Brian

BT Vision should be able to stream HD material in theory, it's just that BT hasn't made any available yet. I don't think Tiscali has HD outputs, so as far as I know it's limited to SD.

If you want HD but don't want the subscription costs of Sky/Virgin Media I'd recommend freesat. Freeview has a very narrow bandwidth, which means that not many channels can be squeezed down to the box. A HD channel takes up about the same amount of space as 5 SD channels, so if Freeview offered a completely Freeview service at the minute you would get 5 HD channels!

Gerald Morgan
http://www.freesat-box.com

I have PlayTV for for Playstation 3 and all I have to say is Wow!

This is better than any PVR on the market right now and for the foreseable future. You can pause/rewind etc, record one channel watch another, lovely chocolate smooth interface that is high defintion, it appears to upscale the TV signal, the amount you can record is dependent on your hard drive*, has massive update potential with direct link to Playstation Network**, allows you to export your recorded material, timer, auto-switch off option after record, turn on autmatically option to record, EPG layout is second to none. And you can all this and a little more while playing your games, watching Blu-Ray/DVD, watching video files, listen to music files, curing cancer, surfing the internet, viewing photo's and video/voice/text chatting with friends and family who also have a Plastation 3***.

Some people have asked Sony to apply the following updates and extra features in a software update when it is inevidebly rolled out as they do with everything else as part of the evolving PS3:

-Search by genre (movies, documentary, sport etc)
-Faster EPG info (can take time on occassions)
-Quicker load up
-Setanta/Playstation Network co-operation as the PlayTV hardware doesn't have a card slot

Once you have exported recorded video out of PlayTV's library into the PS3's main desktop you have full functionality of the PS3's video media player including access to a very handy auto-chapter function which is created automatically as the video is lauched (which takes about (0.5 seconds including nice balck fade-out/fade-in effect). You can set the bookmarks to be 1min, 5 mins or 10 mins. This is extremely welcome as commercial broadcasts have advertisments. And yes, you can export them further to USB HDD's or USB flash drives to put on your PC. Although you will need to convert it, it is m2ts standard with is MPEG-2 Transport codec.

*I have a 320GB internal HDD in my PS3 and a 1TB external HDD connected via USB, a 2 hour movie usually uses up around 2GB unless it is on BBC 1 or 2 where it is around 2.6GB due to the higher bitrate quality output transmitted by the BBC.

**Sony are regularly rolling out updates that add new functionality, and this also applies to the software title's and Hardware on the PS3 such. There is no reason why the PlayTV hardware cannot be reprogrammed by a firmware update to accept HD trasmission over the airwaves, even if it wasn't designed to do so. 99% of the software is on the actual PS3 and so whatever frequency and codec HDTV is pumped out on, the software can be changed to decode it at 100% efficiency.

***The quality of the video playback that was recording while playing games etc is just as good as the seemingly upscaled live feed from the aerial. Despite exiting the game and launching a tool the uses intensive mathematics help cure cancer their was no break in playback at all.

NT: The PlayTV hardware is smaller than nearly any other PVR or standard Freeview box in the market and takes around 5 minutes to get up and working when taken out of the box,installation is automated and uses that time to show you a video tutorial.

To behonest with you, when HD comes I think PlayTV will really come into its own. At the moment, it only comes second to Sky+ because of the availabilty of channels but on actually functionality Sky+ looks over a decade old and that is likely to increase given its potential.

Now I'm pretty sure you've bought something by now so this doesn't help you but if any else is reading this post then there is something you should now that tips the favour towards the PS3 Play TV. An update that came out today added a fair few, one of much significant importance is the ability to upscale Stand Deffintion (SD) TV to High Deffinition (HD) TV. Considering on the ground that all of these recorders WERE on the same grounds since they all DID the same thing, show SD tv. I have the humax freesat HD, yes its very nice, no complaints, but it is a shame there is only bbc hd, (chanel 4 and ivt occasionally allow you to watch hd versions of some of their programs when you press the red button) as a HD channel, plus its very expensive. But now the PS3 Play TV upscales Sd to HD it puts it far above the others. So I HIGHLY recomend getting the PS3 Play TV because it is a really great SD upscalling to HD freeview recorder. (BTW I'm going to test to see what happens if I plug it into my sataliet plug and if that gives me BBC HD or something, lol, cross my fingers). and to point out the PS3 Play TV is only £50.