So they are going to finally deliver the tech needed to make the ads they've been running with somew sort of famous actor actually possible and not complete fabrications.
Digital dongle transforms European XBOXen into tellies
Microsoft has announced that European XBOX One owners will soon be able to acquire a digital TV tuner for their games consoles. The ₤24.99 or €29.99 device is pretty simple. Plug one end into a TV antenna. Plug the other into the XBOX. If you don't know which end belongs where, it won't take you long to figure it out. Once …
COMMENTS
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Friday 8th August 2014 20:29 GMT donguevas
Re: ₤24.99
Stop gobbling on Job's dead noodle. Apple would charge three times as much.
This is great for people who only use monitors or who actually want to split the screen or just want this advantage in the living room.
Actually, AT&T in the US did this with Microsoft and their UVERSE service years ago. You could buy a kit that allowed you to use your 360 as an extra cable box and access the dvr and all the features via the Xbox.
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Friday 8th August 2014 07:25 GMT James 51
Have a 360. Was waiting till at least the first redesign to think about buying a One. If this could accept at least two feeds (four would be nice) from satellite dishes and act as a PVR (preferably with an external HDD or swap out internal HDD for something much bigger) I would trade in now. Of course it would need to be able to accept decoder cards. *sigh* Doubt we'll see that any time soon.
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Friday 8th August 2014 09:56 GMT DrXym
To effectively act as a PVR, you need a twin tuner. One tuner is tuned to the mux containing the channel you are watching, the other tuner to the mux containing the channel you want to record.
Theoretically a single tuner could watch one channel and record another so long as they were in the same mux. It could also timeshift what you are watching - pause live tv etc. But ordinarily you would want two tuners.
You wouldn't need a decoder card. The USB dongle would just spew out a transport stream and the software in the computer / xbox would extra the audio & video just like it does with a DVD or other stream of content.
Anyway, this tuner is DVB-T/T2/C only which is far easier to do and there are plenty such devices already. A satellite tuner would require the dongle to send a voltage and signal to the LNB on the dish to set the polarisation and frequency. This obviously poses issues for a USB device and it would probably require an external power supply. And if you wanted twin tuner then the dongle would have to have an input for each LNB.
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Friday 8th August 2014 12:41 GMT DrXym
Some set top boxes take a CAM (conditional access module) which is a PCMCIA card that decrypts subscription channels. Anyway there is no reason decryption has to be done in hardware. If Microsoft intended to show TV from an encrypted service they could do so in software. I doubt they'd bother though.
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Friday 8th August 2014 08:34 GMT StripeyMiata
Re: Didn't Sony do this a few years ago?
I assume you're talking about a PlayTV? I have one, bought shortly after launch for £69.99 and still have it. I dumped Sky at the time which was £40 a month so it's paid for itself.
So basically it turns your PS3 into a PVR. You are limited by the size of your PS3's HD, with my first 80GB PS3 that meant that I could only record about 10 hours of stuff, when that failed I got one with a bigger HD and it stores more. It has some social media bits, you can live chat with people while watching the same program, post what you are watching to Facebook and recommend stuff to PSN friends to watch.
As I PVR it's fine, only drawback is it takes about 15 seconds to start. Also twice in the last few years the software got corrupted and I had to reinstall, unfortunately I lost my recordings both times. Bit of a pain and a common problem. Also it upscales the picture to HD apparently but I never really noticed the difference. Speaking of HD, you can't view/record HD channels on it, this is a hardware limitation, not software so will never be fixed.
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Friday 8th August 2014 09:51 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Didn't Sony do this a few years ago?
Sony did do this in 2007, and it was very successful in Europe, It also acted as a PVR fro recording (which this doesn't).
The reason it's not talked about on Wikipedia, is PlayTV was never released in the US, because they have a different TV standard and broadcast infrastructure.
As the console sections of Wikipedia are mostly controlled by American fanboys, it doesn't get much attention.
It was a nice device however, well priced, effective and reliable. I used my alot before I got a dedicated FreeSat PVR, and now sill use mine to record stuff that isn't on FreeSat but was on Freeview.
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Friday 8th August 2014 10:30 GMT DrXym
Re: Didn't Sony do this a few years ago?
PlayTV was dual tuner so it was a genuine PVR. The problem with using a console as a PVR is that the thing has to be always on (even if that means a low power state) in order to respond to recording events and consoles consume far more power than a typical set top box would.
I think the benefits of using a console for TV are pretty marginal. An XB1 doesn't pass through HDMI when it's turned off so you're burning an extra 200W if you chain the satellite and/or terrestrial through it.
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Friday 8th August 2014 08:27 GMT Big_Ted
Wow what a waste of money for almost everyone.....
I would think that most people have the xbox connected to the TV that also is connected to Sky, Virgin or Freeview.....
So instead of changing channel on the tv you can now change channel on the xbox......
Cor what a major update to the hardware.
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Friday 8th August 2014 09:52 GMT Kevin Johnston
More to the point....you are connecting all the sources to a single display system?
This may work great in your minimalist loft-style apartment bachelor pad but as soon as you get a life (and at least one more person living in the property) the conflicts start where one wants to play on the XBox (other games consoles are available), one wants to watch the football on Sky (yada yada) and a third has bought that film that everyone wanted to watch but couldn't be arsed to pay out to watch in the cinema.
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Friday 8th August 2014 16:30 GMT the spectacularly refined chap
Awwww - did you miss this bit? 'It will also be possible to split your screen so that a big window will be devoted to games and a small one to television programs.'
No-one missed that bit. You apparently missed basic comprehension at school though. He did state that he was referring to the TV's built in Freeview decoder. Just like the poster before him he wasn't talking directly about this device.
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Friday 8th August 2014 11:10 GMT dogged
Well, we ditched Sky a year ago, relying instead on Netflix on the 360 and Freeview. The issue is that the Freeview receiver is built directly into the telly, meaning the XBone's clever overlay/passthrough thing doesn't work (because there is no "signal out" from the TV set).
With one of these, you don't need Sky or any kind of STB. I suspect that's the whole point.
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Friday 8th August 2014 16:32 GMT Anonymous Coward
@Big_Ted "Wow what a waste of money for almost everyone."
I know that the article didn't explicitly mention that it won't be mandatory for all XBox-One owners to purchase this device, but maybe only people who think they have a use for it will buy one of these, and it won't be a waste of money for at least some of them, and it won't be a waste of money at all for the people who don't buy one (because they won't waste any money on it).
It's a relatively cheap niche product that some people will find useful, but most Xbox One users probably don't have a need for. Get over it already.
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Friday 8th August 2014 18:43 GMT Cynic_999
So let me get this right - you plug your Xbox into a television set, and then by spending £24 you can watch television on that same television? Could you not cut out the middleware and connect your TV aerial into the socket in the back of your TV set instead of the £24 dongle?
Still, if it catches on, I might come up with a USB dongle that you can plug into your PC and then use your mouse, keyboard and monitor as a computer.