August 29, 2008

New V+ box still in testing

Word from a Virgin Media insider suggests that the new Samsung V+ box reported earlier this year is still in testing at the company and doesn't look like to be available to customers just yet. As always with VM, the holding of breath is not advised...
(Personally, I find the existing Scientific Atlanta box as stable as any other PVR these days, so I'll happily wait until the inevitable bugs are sorted out before asking for a newer one.)

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

I believe virgin1 was going to give some info before he disappeared.

Anonymous said...

Shame that with the complete lack of HD (not a position I expected to still be in in Aug 2008) even with tight funds VM haven't taken the opportunity to look into an MPEG4 box. The decision in Telewest days to go MPEG2 was entirely correct but with nothing happening in a hurry things have changed...

I know people complain about the v+ but in terms of speed and stability it is vastly superior to the old Pace Box I had and the two SA ones. In terms of vod and software it is equal to or ahead of the opposition (until the new sky EPG for hd comes along and sky vod).

My main problem is the stingy hard disc and everything being on ancient MPEG2 taking up loads of space and secondly the whole rental thing and not being allowed to upgrade it to a more realistic 320 or 500Mb.

Nialli said...

The Samsung could well be Mpeg4 - I don't have any tech spec though to check. It may fail internal testing at VM and never appear. Frankly, your guess is as good as mine.

Anonymous said...

I'd heard it wasn't MPEG4.

Anonymous said...

I would not agree with what you say about the box being reliable. I joined in March and am now on my fourth V+ box due to constant faults.

Nialli said...

That's pretty bad. I'm still on my first box (a silver TV Drive) which I've had 18 months. I've reformatted the disc twice (to remove corrupted series links) but other than that no reliability problems at all. I guess all hardware can vary from machine to machine, but the software's pretty stable these days - still a few bugs, but nothing horrendous to my knowledge.