monstrous lie
Infinitely Baffled
Can any clued-up individual help with my TV-related dilemma, please?
My TV arrangements up till now have been a smart TV (so, with iPlayer, all the other catch-up stuff, Netflix, Youtube etc, etc.), built-in Freeview (obviously), and a (non-smart) Freeview digi-box to provide recording capability and pause/rewind etc functionality. Like everybody else, I toggle between these three sources using the appropriate button on the remote. So far so good ...
However, my Freeview digi-box has now packed-up and so I am looking for a replacement, but my problem is that they are all "smart" digi-boxes these days, that is to say they duplicate the apps and internet connectivity that the TV already has. No problem - you would have thought; just use the smart digi-box for everything and don't bother to ever select the smart apps built into the TV. That sounds logical, but my concern is that the two components will prove incompatible because of the duplcation of functionality. I have got this idea from a brief flirtation I had a few years ago with BT's subscription TV service. BT provided me with a smart Freeview decoder box which I plugged into my telly ... and got nothing but grief whenever I wanted to watch catch-up! The two devices fought like cat and dog. It might, I suppose, be to do with the fact that the BT box was only capable of being connected to the broadband router using an ethernet cable (so the router was in effect talking to the telly via wi-fi and to the BT box via ethernet simultaneously), but I can't really see why that should be.
Hence that episode has left me suspicious of trying to pair a smart Freeview box with a smart TV. But surely, I can't be the only person to find myself in the situation of needing to do that? So have any of you dear readers got an arrangement like that, and does it work satisfactorily? Or, to put it another way, does anyone know of any reason why you cannot team-up two such devices that both have similar smart functionality?
ML
My TV arrangements up till now have been a smart TV (so, with iPlayer, all the other catch-up stuff, Netflix, Youtube etc, etc.), built-in Freeview (obviously), and a (non-smart) Freeview digi-box to provide recording capability and pause/rewind etc functionality. Like everybody else, I toggle between these three sources using the appropriate button on the remote. So far so good ...
However, my Freeview digi-box has now packed-up and so I am looking for a replacement, but my problem is that they are all "smart" digi-boxes these days, that is to say they duplicate the apps and internet connectivity that the TV already has. No problem - you would have thought; just use the smart digi-box for everything and don't bother to ever select the smart apps built into the TV. That sounds logical, but my concern is that the two components will prove incompatible because of the duplcation of functionality. I have got this idea from a brief flirtation I had a few years ago with BT's subscription TV service. BT provided me with a smart Freeview decoder box which I plugged into my telly ... and got nothing but grief whenever I wanted to watch catch-up! The two devices fought like cat and dog. It might, I suppose, be to do with the fact that the BT box was only capable of being connected to the broadband router using an ethernet cable (so the router was in effect talking to the telly via wi-fi and to the BT box via ethernet simultaneously), but I can't really see why that should be.
Hence that episode has left me suspicious of trying to pair a smart Freeview box with a smart TV. But surely, I can't be the only person to find myself in the situation of needing to do that? So have any of you dear readers got an arrangement like that, and does it work satisfactorily? Or, to put it another way, does anyone know of any reason why you cannot team-up two such devices that both have similar smart functionality?
ML