Replacing Sky Television

stevielamb

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Hi all,

I'm desperate to rid my bank balance of the ever increasing Sky subscription charges. To be honest, we hardly make use of Sky but the problem I have is that the wife loves the convenience of recording programmes and then watching her stuff later in a different room.

We have no interest in most of the output that Sky offers as we don't have any of the premium channels and rarely watch SkyOne or any of the others so Freeview gives us all we really need. But I need the flexibility of recording in one room, having the programme being added to a planner and then being able to watch the recorded output to a different television later.

We have tv's in a number of rooms and for a number of years have been using the old technique of passing the signal from the rf2 port on the Sky box into the loft where the tv and remote control signal is distributed to about 4 or 5 other televisions in the house.

Is there a freeview box that could offer similar functionality or a better approach maybe using cat5 cable? All the televsions are connected to my home network.

I contacted Humax earlier this week about multi-room functionality. They used to offer an option called H3-Espresso which was a "mini" freeview box that connected to their main freeview box and allowed playback of recording but it didn't get good reviews and is now no longer sold. It doesn't seem they offer any alternative.

I have Plex on a media server and tried their PVR functionality last year but was constantly hit with failed recordings. Also, it wasn't very user friendly and I don't think my wife would've got on with the user interface had I made it work.

Any suggestions gratefully accepted.

Thanks,


Steve.
 
Hi and welcome to the forum.
Your first stopping place should be Freeview’s official website.
 
The new Humax Aura Freeview box can apparently stream to an Android app. Not sure if it can stream to other Aura boxes though.
Might be possible - the box runs Android..
 
I do find it frustrating and pretty unbelievable really that there is no real equivalent to sky q for Freeview . Sure you can get a PVR but one that you can access recordings on in other rooms and watch them on other TVs that's when it starts getting far more difficult than it should be. I don't know the answer which is bonkers really
 
Freesat will use your existing satellite cables and has an app for series link etc, it has all the catch up services too so that might do the job.
 
Freesat will use your existing satellite cables and has an app for series link etc, it has all the catch up services too so that might do the job.

It doesn't support streaming between boxes though.
 
It doesn't support streaming between boxes though.
No, but is there much that you can record that’s not on catchup? The amount I record has decreased massively in the last year.
Freesat has better quality HD than Freeveiw but doesn’t have C4 HD (due to a dispute)
How much is a typical SKY package these days?

* just a thought but would an Apple TV 4K box in each room also be enough? It has all the live TV and catch-up...
 
The poster specifically asked about being able to stream between boxes though.
 
You can do it with enigma 2 sat boxes, there is an an addon built into Kodi that you enter the IP address of your satellite receiver, you then get full EPG watch live TV setup and watch recordings
 
No, but is there much that you can record that’s not on catchup? The amount I record has decreased massively in the last year.
Freesat has better quality HD than Freeveiw but doesn’t have C4 HD (due to a dispute)
How much is a typical SKY package these days?

* just a thought but would an Apple TV 4K box in each room also be enough? It has all the live TV and catch-up...

Catch-up is largely SD and awful quality, it's simply not an option for me to rely on that
 

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