FrequencyCast UK – Show #10

This show’s news section covers the following:

• TUTV Anytime boxes out now: Early boxes had a number of minor problems which should be fixed in an over-the-air software update scheduled for early January 2007. More on our Anytime page.

• TheJazz Hits the air: On Christmas Day 2006, a national jazz digital radio station, called “thejazz” was launched.
  The station is now available on DAB Digital Radio as well as on Sky Digital channel 0113, NTL cable channel 961 and online at www.thejazz.com.

• Slingbox news. The Slingbox lets you watch your home TV and recordings over the Internet. At the time of recording, a £50 off voucher was available to get the price down to £129.00.
  Also, Mac users note that a version is available for Mac OS. There’s also a Symbian OS version available for mobile phone users wanting TV on the move – it’s designed for the Nokia E65 on three‘s network.

• GPS PDA and Phone: We’ve fallen in love with the new XDA Orbit, from o2. This phone combines a phone and Windows Mobile PDA, with a GPS receiver, so you have a one-box phone, organiser, Internet and email device, that’s capable of satellite navigation with no extra hardware. This is powerful phone and PDA, and it’s also a comfy hold. If you’re into your power phones, and fancy being able to navigate in your car or on foot with just a phone, check out the sexy XDA Orbit.
  It’s available for free on some o2 online tariffs, the Orbit is also carried by T-Mobile, where it’s known as the MDA Compact III.

• BT Home Hub: From 20th December 2006, the hubs are being automatically updated with version 6.2.2.6 of the hub software, offering improvements to the user interface.
• FM transmitters for MP3: In December 2006, the UK Government finally agreed that the previously-banned FM transmitters used illegally by many people in the UK to re-broadcast their MP3 players to their in-car FM radio… could now be used legally.
  If you want to get your MP3 player transmitting to your FM radio, take a look at the range of short-range FM transmitters at AdvancedMP3players and
  Play.com. Prices start from around £10. iPod users may want to try the Griffin iTrip.

• Evesham iPlayer: We’ve recently seen the launch of the Evesham iPlayer HD Media Centre. This is based on the popular NetGem iPlayer Freeview set-top box, and adds a hard-disk recorder (for up to 40 hours recording). It also supports Video on Demand – downloadable TV content over a broadband connection. Most importantly, the HD Media Centre has an onboard High-Definition upscaler, so you can get pseudo High Definition on your HDTV.
  Price is around £235 from Misco.co.uk
  .

Freeview news snippets since the last show:

• NHS Direct Interactive – Now available on Freeview, this is a text-based service with 150 pages of interactive content. To access NHS Direct TV, go to channel 108, and press the red Interactive button, then scroll to ‘NHS Direct Interactive’

Considering all of the mail we’ve had about Top Up TV Anytime, this was a tough product to review. We’re not keen on what Top UP TV has done to the existing ‘view-only’ subscription service (reducing the channels and hours), and we know a lot of Top Up’s customers weren’t happy forking out on a new set-top box. However, we tried to put that to one side when reviewing the new Anytime box made by Thomson. It is clever – being able to record programmes overnight, so you can have a library of 100 hours of shows to watch on demand, and it’s a well made box. At the time of recording, there were some glitches reported by some users, which will apparently be fixed by an over-the-air software update in the early half of January 2007. Hear us review the box on our show, or check our the Top Up TV Anytime page for a review and some photos.

Always good to get our hands on a new piece of technology early on, and we were lucky enough to get the whole of the FrequencyCast production team together for an afternoon with the Nintendo Wii games machine.

The Nintendo Wii launched at the start of December 2006 – and makes use of wireless controllers for some truly realistic gameplay. At the time of recording, the Wii is still in very short supply, but we’re told it should be a lot easier to have a Wii in early 2007.

Listen in to this show to hear us try out a few games, and see our Nintendo Wii page for some screenshots and more details.

We broadcast an unplanned part of the show… and need our listeners help. Gadgets are Great, or Technology is Tedious. Cast your vote:

Thanks to everyone who got in touch. In this show, we respond to the following mails and calls:

• Streaming audio to a Pocket PC: James asked us: “I have a few hundred gigabytes of music on my desktop PC. I have a couple of pocket PC’s. Is there any software that you’d recommend that would let me stream the music to one of my pocket PC’s from the desktop via my wireless network in my home?”.
  Three apps worth a look… There’s a free app called Streaming Playlist , something called Mercora, or our personal favourite Orb (that can also stream video and images as well as audio from your PC).
  
• BT Home Hub Help: We had a mail from Gary Mitchell: “I am having problems with my BT HomeHub.  All was working fine but now it is telling me that it cannot find the IP address of my machine? BT Technical help were useless. How can I get the hub to recognize my machines IP address?”. When connecting to a router like the Home Hub, it’s important to make sure that the PC has an IP address in a range that the Home Hub can cope with, so you may need to alter you Home Hub’s IP range, or change your PC’s IP address. We’ve added a more detailed answer to this on our Home Hub FAQ page. We’ve also heard from Raymond Reid who’s having a problem getting equipment to connect to the Home Hub wirelessly. Again, we’ve answered this on our Home Hub FAQ page.
  
• Portable Radio with RDS – Thanks for Chris Harrold for getting in touch – He asks: “I’m going all over the world in the coming year, both on business and pleasure. Mostly in Europe but also as far field as Iran and New Zealand.
  I would like a small compact radio with RDS (preferably with the clock update features)” What can we recommend?
  Well, from our research, the Roberts R9921 came up favourite – this offers FM/AM and Shortwave, RDS, clock, alarm and world time, and it’s available from Amazon.
  For something smaller, there’s the Sony ICF-M33RDSS portable radio with RDS, available from
  Pixmania. Chris also mentioned a DAB radio… there’s the Roberts Radio RD49 with FM, DAB and RDS. All three radios are around £50 each.

• Missing DAB stations: We heard from Margaret in Lancashire saying that she was getting “Station Unavailable” when tuning into local DAB digital radio stations. This is normally down to signal strength, and lots of factors can affect signal. Try moving the radio to a different location, make sure the aerial is fully extended, and try it in upstairs near a window.
• Recording Freeview from a digital TV: Steve Hopwood asked… “We have a TV with a single built in Freeview tuner. What, if anything, do we need to do to be able to continue to record onto VHS when only digital TV is available?” Most TV sets with an integral Freeview tuner support sending the Freeview output via SCART socket to a DVD or VHS recorder. You should check your digital TV’s manual to see how to get the Freeview output connected to a recorder. In the event that your TV doesn’t support outputting Freeview to a SCART socket, as a last resort, you could consider buying a cheap Freeview set-top box just for use with your recorder.
• NetGem iPlayer infrared codes: A caller to our podline asked us if we could help with the infrared remote control codes to use with his iPlayer. The caller didn’t tell us the make of remote control he was trying to program, and different manufacturers use different codes. We suggested the code 1322 might be worth a go, as we know this works with some of the One-for-all remotes.

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