Using Sky with Hard Drive DVD recorders

littleTimmy

I recently purchased a Philips Hard drive DVD recorder (the particular model I can't recall off hand) and the salesperson assued me that it would work with Sky. As sky has not yet been installed in my home I am not yet sure. Does anyone know whether it shoudl eb relatively easy to get the DVD recorder to recrd sky channels and pause etc? I am particularly worried that I'll end up with 3 different remote controls in order to carry out just the basic tasks. Would I best off with a Sky+ box?

mickoneill30

I've never used it but I wouldn't imagine it would be any harder than using a video recorder. You will probably have the 2 controllers though (the sky controller can control your TV) or you can get a programmable one.

If you're subscribing to Skys premium channels then the Sky+ box only costs the initial purchase price. If you're only getting the basic channels then you have to pay a monthly fee.

littleTimmy

Cheers Mick,
I'm sure there might be some subtleties to it but I'll see how it goes!

Ivan E

What exactly do you want to do?

Don't have a DVD-HD recorder or Sky for that matter. I have NTL digital and a DVD recorder though that uses DVD-RAM and as such has the pause live tv feature. To be honest, I have never actually used it. The DVD recorder will record digital tv no problem though. The ntl box is just picked up on an AV station just like a DVD player etc and the recorder just records the box and not individual channels. So change the digital channel and you change what you're recording.

The time slip functionality seems to work by hitting a button initially and it will start to record while you are watching the programme. That may be slightly different with the hard drive in that it might do this automatically. Mine, it records to the disc. I can record things and watch them from the beginning as the programme is still recording i.e start recording Top Gear at 8pm and walk in at 8:15pm and start watching from the beginning. The time slip I assume works on the same basis just that I start watching it at 8 and I can pause it then at anytime, say 8:15 for a few minutes and then carry on watching it a few minutes behind the live broadcast.

ffocused

If your recorder has tvlink on it, you can record from sky via autoview. you leave the recorder in a tvlnk standby mode and the digibox will send a wake up signal to start recording and a stop signal at the end.
If it does not have tvlink it will work like a vcr using the timer function.

mathias

Hello there ,
As you dont already have Sky , I think what you need to know is this ,

Coming down from the dish into your sitting room is a cable , the signal on this cable is encrypted , it cant be split like analog cable , and it has to be fed into a sky box to be decoded , then from the EPG on sky , you select what you want to watch .
You cannot connect the cable into anything else other than a sky box.

This is a standard Sky installation , and as it has only one cable ( one signal feed ) you can watch only one station at a time , your philips hard drive recorder will record off the scart socket on the back of the Sky box but you have to watch what you are recording , you cant record one channel and watch something else at the same time.
It should also be able to timeshift , it will do this by recording off the scart socket and is really no different to the ordinary recording process.

Sky plus uses two cables ( two signal feeds ) coming from the satellite. With this you can record one channel and watch another. Everything is recorded onto the Sky plus hard drive. Your hard drive recorder will still only be able to record from the scart socket but the functionality of the Sky plus box kind of makes it obsolete.
Its handy if you want to transfer over stuff and make DVD's to keep , but thats about it.

So , all in all , with a Sky installation , Sky plus is better than any external DVD hard drive recorder.