Freeview boxes in Scotland go dark

Thousands of Freeview set-top boxes in Scotland have suddenly become obsolete, after a transmitter upgrade. The same thing happened in the Birmingham area a couple of months back.


Affected boxes include: Daewoo DS608P , Daewoo SV900 , Labgear DTT100 , Portland DP100 and the Triax DVB2000T, which apparently lack enough internal memory to hold the full list of Freeview channels.

The story broke in the Daily Record 5 July 2008, and includes a quite from this site.

There are believed to be between 200,000 and 350,000 affected boxes in the UK, and as the transmitter networks get upgraded ready for the Digital Switchover, more and more boxes are set to beome landfill fodder

Podcast: iPlayer, Virgin Media and Eee PC

Show 26 of FrequencyCast, our online radio show, has just been released.

In this show, we cover the BBC iPlayer, Virgin Media, new Freeview channels and news of FreeSat. We also take a look at the Eee PC, try a new Wii game, and talk surge protectors, iPhones and much, much more.

Download Show 26 direct to your MP3 player, or listen online at http://www.frequencycast.co.uk/latest.html

Got iTunes? Play, download or subscribe: http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=142899029

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Freeview HD by 2009

Finally, High Definition looks set to come to Freeview. UK Regulator Ofcom has announced that we can expect up to four high-definition digital TV channels to be delivered via a TV on Freeview as soon as 2009. One of these four channels will be offered to the BBC, with the other three reportedly up for tender.

The space for these channels will be freed up by getting the existing Freeview services to shift to a new transmission standard called DVB-T2, make of MPEG-4 compression technology, combined with some channel reshuffling. These changes are expected to happen side-by-side with each TV region's digital switchover programme, so it won't be until 2012 that all 4 Freeview HD channels are available across the whole UK

It's expected that viewers will need to get a new Freeview box to get HD, but existing boxes will continue to work for non-HD Freeview channels.

More on UK HD