Skybox F5 - is the timer worth the bother?

[highlandboogieman]

Hi guys

This is my first proper post. I'm an old Scottish boogie man living in Andalucia, Spain - gradually getting to know the F5 and an inquisitve mind obviously helps.

I've been able to record via a 32gb USB, but the box won't let me record HD channels. And I've had no success with the timer. The pathetic manual with the box makes me scream Scottish obscenities through my magnifying glass. EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEKKKK !!

Having recently ditched a great old Panasonic Super VHS video recorder, I reckon I'm probably best to buy a hard-disc recorder which can record HD programmes. I'm also thinking about upgrading my DVD to a Blu-Ray player/recorder. Any advice or opinions will be very welcome. Is the F5 timer really worth pursuing? The picture is good but jerky.

The wee box is great though and the HD picture quality on my new Panny plasma is simply amazing.

Fechty wachles for the noo from Jimbo

[darcu5]

i think if you got yourseld an external hd with it's own power supply then you will notice a big difference in the quality, ie not jerky, even when recrded on hd channels

[mahrkpat]

I don't if this will really help but try a pdf version of the manual:

F3_M3_F4_F5 manual.zip

[gerrywac]

I have a fairly new F3 which was the first sat box I've had that supported PVR. I found out very quickly that if you want to use a memory stick that the success or otherwise deopends very much on the speed of the usb device. I initially tried a quite old Kingston USB2 stick and that recordd faultlessly in standard and HD but as it was only 8Gb that was not sufficient than 45min of timeshift in time/rec mode so I then bough a larger 64Gb stick expecting similar results.
Unfortunately despite this too being a USB2 I discovered it only worked well on SD and even that was flaky when the high speed forward/rewind was used. In HD it would not record at all. A message to the effect device speed insufficient came up.
I'm ok with recording in SD so I didn't investigate further but think a USB3 device would be the answer or a USB hard drive.

Didn't have any problem with timeshift

[genam]

External HDD works a treat.... portable ones don't need much power so work fine but a desktop version is even better.

[Hadron]

I use a 2.5" HDD from an old laptop. Bought a sata enclosure from Ebay for less than ?4. Works fine on SD & HD.

[highlandboogieman]

Thanks very much for your help and advice guys. I have an old hard drive with a power supply which I'll try. Looks like it's worth pursuing the timer on the F5 box.

Mahrkpat, thanks for your 'pdf manual but the file won't open after unzipping and it's not recognised by my computer as a .pdf. And God knows I get enough Adobe updates.... I'll look around for a .pdf manual.

Jim

[Hadron]

...Mahrkpat, thanks for your 'pdf manual but the file won't open after unzipping and it's not recognised by my computer as a .pdf. And God knows I get enough Adobe updates.... I'll look around for a .pdf manual.

Jim

That's odd. Works OK for me with Acrobat X.

You can also download it from here:-

Skybox F3/M3/F4/F5 User Manual_Shenzhen Yojia Technology Co., Ltd.