October 10, 2009

HD highlights this weekend

Some high def programmes on Virgin worth checking out this weekend:

Saturday

4HD - 7.30pm Film: Oliver Twist (the 2005 Polanski version with Ben Kingsley)
BBC HD - 9.15pm Emma (repeat of last sunday's first bonnet-laden episode)
4HD - 6.30pm Okay, so it's not shot in HD, but Kevin McCloud's Grand Tour is my favourite show of the autumn and it looks fabulous with the wider bandwidth on the HD channel. This is a repeat of the first episode - the final episode is on Sunday at 9pm.

Sunday
4HD - 10pm Film: House of Flying Daggers (visually stunning in SD - be prepared for serious eye burning in high def)
Living HD - lots of episodes of Ghost Whisperer and an episode from the first season of CSI in HD
FX HD - new HBO comedy Eastbound and Down debuts at 10pm with two episodes, and there's a repeat of the first episode of Life on Mars USA at 9pm (which didn't push my buttons)
Nat Geo HD - 8pm Wild Russia is pretty stunning if you haven't spotted that on the schedules yet, and Richard Hammond's Engineering Connections at 9pm is pretty good too.

7 comments:

Unknown said...

Ghost Whisperer? Urgh. No thanks. Less 'psychic' and 'ghost' related rubbish please.

Afront said...

Not a Top Gear fan but I've been enjoying Richard Hammond's Engineering Connections - Nat Geo HD are showing both series 1 & 2 currently so clear your V+ now!

JRW said...

I can now half fill the 160GB disk in my V+ with just my household's weekend viewing on HD. 40 hours is way too little. I spoke to VM today about the eSATA port, and the guy said that they were considering enabling the eSATA port. Does anyone have any news on this? (My friend tried fitting a 500GB disk, but got a stop message at the disk format stage.)

Nialli said...

It's 80 hours of SD but only 20 of HD, so the problem's even worse than you thought!
As the V+ is not a customer's personal property but still owned by Virgin, you cannot legally upgrade the internal hard disc without their permission - what your friend did was a serious no-no.
I don't know about enabling the eSATA port for adding external storage: I would have thought it wasn't a straightforward option for most customers.
It was always going to be a problem once we got more HD channels, and even a shift to MPeg 4 compression wouldn't address it fully.

Mark said...

Virgin customers wanting to record in HD will just have to content themselves with the current capacity of the hard drive.
Using the PVR as a timeshift (rather than a stored library of content), even twenty hours is enough given that almost everything shown in HD is later repeated and repeated (and repeated) and don't forget HD VOD!
I know Virgin have no plans to enable the eSATA in the foreseeable future or to increase the size of the V+ hard drive.

JRW said...

20 hours is OK for a few days, but there are four people in my house, all with different taste, all of whom timeshift. When we go on holiday we now have to decide what to drop down to SD as the disk overflows. VoD is only good for 7 days and doesn't track what you've seen/not seen yet.

Mark said...

Why not give up taking holidays and, with the money saved, rent another V+ Box?
LOL