Sky box ,recording without subscription?

[foxhole]

Heard this is now possible? anyone confirm?

 

[Lucid]

Where have you heard that from?

 

[foxhole]

http://www.hotukdeals.com/misc/sky-box-now-recording-without-subscription-2243526?page=2#comments


Seems to be hit and miss as to getting it to work.

 

[Lucid]

It's well documented that Sky's recording and playback features are subscription-based. AFAIK the boxes were brought in to the UK on a lower import duty tariff because of this limitation. If there's a loophole opened up with certain models of box missing the update then I can see Sky working very hard to end that because of the tax implications.

That doesn't mean you shouldn't try it. Just don't hold your breath.

 

[spannerzone]

I bought a Sky Plus box on ebay years ago and the supplied blue card still allowed the box to record free to air channels. With the old blue cards, if you removed them from the box before Sky sent out the kill signal (to stop it working once the subscription had expired) the card never got killed and the recording feature still works in the box it was assigned to. Later white cards don't work this way (Sky learnt!) so the white cards need a 'keep alive' signal to keep them working rather than a 'kill' signal to stop it working.

So unless you can buy a Sky Plus box with an old working blue card, I don't think there's any way other than pay £10 a month to Sky to enable the recording functionality.

The one caveat is that someone did find a hack for the Pace first gen SkyPlus box where they got it recording free to air channels, not sure if it still works but it was a techy fix that required some skills in soldering and jtagging.

 

[foxhole]

Have a spare box and two blue cards, one gives the "you need to subscribe" warning when record is pressed the other does not respond at all.
Have a freesat recorder but the wife can't understand it, need to change one of them.

 

[ericmark]

My old Sky+ box was replaced because the card reader did not work, and it will not record or allow you to delay viewing, however it still spins up the hard drive from time to time and even on stand by still powers the LNB so uses at least 8W which is what the LNB requires.

The free to air boxes however have no problem recording the free programs. But with some the format is not compatible with other computers, so the recorded program can only be played back with the box used to record it.

Not all are set that way, my mothers box can record to a FAT32 formatted stick and I can watch on any TV.

But what the box will do seems to be pot luck, my Blu ray player will allow me to watch all sorts from the internet, but mother free to air box which we though would do the same seems to need some special codes.

The old Philips DVD recorder I had worked A1, it would record 8 hours of TV and you could either go back and see what you had missed, or convert that 8 hours into a recording which you could then select which bits to keep. Then transfer onto a DVD to watch years latter.

However I found the DVD's did not all want to play on the blu ray and some did odd things like a loop which played just part of the DVD over and over again when played with another reader.

Even using the PC to record has not worked that well, with a slightly distorted image.

I have to give Sky their due, recording programs does not only record the program but also all the data with it, so you can still view the program details after recording. There seems to be no loss of quality and I often record on the Sky box then transfer to PC.