Watch David Haye v Wladimir Klitschko for free, legally.

 

If you resent paying Uncle Rupert’s Sky TV £15 to watch Saturday’s boxing match, there is a way you can watch it on your TV for free, and it’s legal too.

The only catch is that you’ll need a satellite dish that’s pointing in a slightly different direction to the one you use for Sky TV. 

If you’ve got an old Sky Analogue dish on your wall somewhere, and it’s in working order, that’ll do nicely!  You could, if you wanted, re-align your current Sky Satellite dish to point to the correct satellite, but that’s tricky if you’ve never done that sort of thing before, and you may well end up with a service call to Sky that’ll cost more than the £15 you saved on the boxing. 

How is this free? Well, German channel RTL Television is showing the boxing free to air on Saturday, broadcast from the (mostly) German satellite Astra at 19.2 East.  That’s where the old Sky Analogue service used to live, so Sky Analogue dishes pointed there.

So, assuming you’ve got a Sky Digibox of some sort, and a dish that’s pointing to Astra 19.2 East, here’s what you do.

Turn the digibox off, and disconnect the current connections to your Sky minidish. Connect it instead to the dish pointing at 19.2 East.

Turn it on again. It’ll complain there’s no signal. Don’t panic! It’s looking for a signal that isn’t on that satellite.

Go to SERVICES, then SYSTEM SETUP, then ADD CHANNELS. You’ll see this screen :

Enter the details as shown here :

Frequency : 12.188

Polarisation : H

Symbol Rate : 27.5

FEC : 3/4

Then select FIND CHANNELS.

If the dish is correctly aligned and it’s all working, you’ll see a list of channels on the transponder that you just chose. Use the yellow button to mark RTL TELEVISION and press select when done.

 

 

That’s it! To view the channel, you’ll need to press services, and choose option OTHER CHANNELS, as shown here.

 

 

 

 

You’ll then see a list of channels that you’ve added. Choose it and…

 

 

 

 

 

There’s RTL Television, on a Sky Digibox :)

 

 

 

 

 

You won’t get a TV guide, but RTL’s coverage of the boxing starts at 20:30 BST on Saturday 2nd July.

Naturally, being a German station, the commentary will be in German too. If you want English, you could mute the TV sound and listen to the coverage on Radio 5 while you watch the TV.

Knowing the frequency of other transponders, you can of course add lots of other channels from this satellite, which you can enjoy until you have to reconnect the Sky Dish to watch usual UK TV.

The match is also free on a few other satellites, I’ve chosen Astra 19.2E here because it’s easy to locate and Sky Analogue dishes pointed at it. For full details of other channels showing the boxing for free, see this site here : Live On Sat

I hope this has been of use!

Overheating DVD Player

 

I recently bought a Sainsbury’s RED HDMI DVD Player Model no 585 408 from a car boot sale, very cheap.  This DVD Player was cheap anyway when new, it’s Sainsbury’s own cheap brand, it’s a very generic Chinese player.  My reason for buying it was to see what it looked like on my new TV using the HDMI inputs, my existing DVD player was connected by scart and didn’t look as good as I’d like.

Initial results were promising, it looked very crisp and clear, but after 10 minutes of playing a disk, it stopped and wouldn’t respond to the remote.  Switching it off fixed it for a while, then it’d lock up again.

 

Thinking I’d found the reason it was being sold cheap at a car boot sale, I thought I’d open it up to have a look inside.  Hoping it was a simple power supply problem I guess.  Indeed, on opening it, I thought the PSU looked nasty, so I cut the cable, and connected it instead to a PC power supply.  The player wanted +5v and +12v, so this was easy enough to arrange.

 

It still crashed, though would run for a bit longer before doing so.

 

The problem turned out to be the processor. Marked MTK1389, it was scorchingly hot, around 60C after just a few minutes, and when it’d been running for a while, it was too hot to comfortably touch.

My solution was simple – I stuck a heatsink on it, from an old PC.  The player now works wonderfully, and hasn’t crashed or locked up since.  I’m very pleased with the picture quality too.

I don’t know if all these models run hot – I opened up a different cheap DVD player, and found a similar processor, though with a different package, and whilst it got warm, it wasn’t anything like as hot as the Sainsbury’s player.

So, is it a design fault, or some curious fault on this particular player?  I’ve no idea, but if you’ve a DVD player that plays for a while then stops, here’s what I did to fix mine. Perhaps It’ll work for you!

 

This is the inside of the player. The lid opened simply by undoing all the screws in the base that were marked with an arrow.  The circuit board in the middle is the main board with the overheating processor, on the right is the PSU board.  Make sure the DVD player is unplugged before opening it up, there’s live mains voltage on the PSU board – keep away!

 

This is a close up of the processor, in this case it’s a MT1389QE.  I carefully wiped the top of it with a cloth that I’d dipped in some Isopropyl Alcohol, to clean and degrease it.

I then got myself a heatsink.  This came from an old PC, and was stuck on the motherboard chipset – it’s not a PC CPU heatsink as I found they were too big.  I prised it off the PC motherboard chipset with a flat bladed screwdriver, and scraped the adhesive from it with a sharp knife and patience! This heatsink was a bit too big. I measured the DVD player CPU, then used a hacksaw to trim a little off one side of the heatsink.  I then cleaned it with soapy water, and degreased the underneath with Isopropyl Alcohol.

 

I then got some heatsink paste. This is Arctic Cooling MX-2, designed for PC CPUs. I squirted a little on the top of the DVD CPU and smeared it evenly across the whole of the surface with a piece of plastic – you could use the edge of an old credit card, or a stiff bit of cardboard.

 

This is the heatsink stuck in place. Note the connector on the immediate right of the CPU – be careful not to short the pins of this with your heatsink.  I then left it for a few hours to set.

This is the DVD player later, after being left playing a DVD for about 35 minutes. (The meter is showing degrees Celcius). I couldn’t get the temperature to rise above 42C, a significant drop from the 60C+ that I was seeing within 10 minutes previously.

 

I reassembled the case, and the player has worked without fault ever since!

 

I hope this is of help to someone, I suspect that this fix might be of benefit to other modern home entertainment devices, such as Freeview or Satellite receivers that tend to start playing up after they’ve been switched on for a little while.  Let me know!

Formatting large external hard disks - FAT32

Prompted by a message in a forum, I've tried connecting external hard disks to my Sony Bravia TV, instead of using USB sticks.

The good news is that I've successfully got it to work with the two disks I tried (20gb and 80gb), though it's not as straightforward as it could be.

If you plug an external hard disk into a Sony Bravia TV, it needs to be FAT or FAT32 format.  The chances are, if it's been used with a Windows machine, it'll be NTFS.

If you try to reformat the hard disk using Windows, it won't give you the option of using FAT or FAT32.  If you're given the option of exFAT, forget it - the Sony Bravia doesn't support this, which is a shame.

The reasons are logical - FAT & FAT32 are dreadfully inefficient on larger disks, wasting lots of space, so Microsoft have imposed an artificial limit of around 32Gb on FAT32 formatting.  However, FAT32, in theory, can support up to 2Tb.

(If you're thinking "ah, I'll nip to the command prompt and use FORMAT F: /FS:FAT32" - forget it.  It'll take ages, appear to be working, but right at the end, tell you it can't do it.  I tried)

So, to get an external hard disk to work with a Sony Bravia, you need to be a bit cunning.

Plug the disk into a PC, open up Windows Explorer, right click on the drive letter and choose "properties" - it'll tell you in there if the external drive is FAT, FAT32, NTFS or some other format.

If you want to reformat it to FAT32, you'll probably have difficulty doing this under Windows.  Right click on the drive in Explorer, and choose format. If you can select "FAT32" under "File System" in the format dialog box, great - go for it.  I suspect it won't appear. ("exFAT" won't help you - the Sony doesn't support this format)

You'll need an additional piece of software that will let you format larger disks with FAT32.  Go here :

http://www.ridgecrop.demon.co.uk/guiformat.htm

And click on the picture of the program, it'll download a little program, save it somewhere useful and run it.

This software is Freeware, but if you find it useful I urge you to click on the Paypal button and donate something to the author.

Make sure you select the correct disk drive! YOU WILL LOSE ALL DATA ON THE DISK THAT YOU FORMAT!

It's very quick (if you choose quick format option).  You can then copy your media files to the hard disk and your Bravia should play them.

I've tested two hard disks - an old 20Gb disk connected via an IDE to USB adaptor, and a slightly less old 80Gb disk, also connected in the same way.  Both work with no problems on my Bravia KDL-32EX403, providing that the files I try to play are in a format the Bravia is happy with (see my earlier post about remuxing to .M2TS)

Hope this helps.

Viewing MPEGs on a Sony Bravia LCD TV

I recently bought a Sony Bravia TV that's got a USB socket on it.  I've also got a Satellite Receiver with USB, and I record programmes onto USB drives.  I then edit them on a PC, and create MPG files, which I can burn to DVD or play on any number of cheap Chinese USB media devices.  None of this process involves recoding, so does not lose any quality - the playback MPEG file is a bit for bit copy of the original broadcast.

I was disappointed to find that my Sony Bravia TV refuses to play these MPG files!

A few days worth of Googling find many other people annoyed at this, but no easy solutions.  I could recode the MPEG into a format the TV likes, but this loses quality.  I want to avoid re-encoding.

Looking at the specs that the Sony Bravia TV supports, I see that M2TS is supported. This is significant, as it's a container file format.  To put it simply, you can wrap M2TS around a standard MPEG file - no re-encoding!

I tried this, and it works!  You can quickly convert MPEG files into a format that will play on a Sony Bravia, with no loss in quality!



First, get yourself a copy of tsMuxeR. This is freeware software, and available from here : http://www.smlabs.net/tsmuxer_en.html (at time of writing, look on the right-hand side of the page, and click on Download tsMuxeR 1.10.6 (Windows).  The software is also available for Mac or Unix, but I've not tried these.

Unzip the file, and copy all the files somewhere useful. I made a folder in C:\Program Files\TSMUXER and put all the files in there.  I then made a shortcut to tsMuxeR GUI.

When you run this, you'll get a fairly simple screen with options on it.  Open an Explorer window, and find an MPEG you want to convert. Drag it across and drop it on the "input files" part of the tsMuxeR window.

Lower down, click the dot next to " m2TS muxing" in the Output section. Change the destination folder by clicking on the Browse button.  You can browse straight to your USB stick if you like, and save the file there.

Then click "Start Muxing". It will only take a few minutes, if that, and it's done!  Disconnect the USB stick, plug it into your Sony Bravia, and you'll be able to play your newly converted MPEG file with no loss in quality.

I hope this helps those frustrated that Sony Bravias are reluctant to play MPG files that play almost anywhere else.