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Post by egnlsn on Apr 16, 2015 18:59:05 GMT -6
I just bought a new STB (the price was right and I can add up to a 3TB USB harddrive to turn it into a DVR), and as I was scanning, I came across 3 pay channels ; Showtime, Starz!, and I don't remember what the other one was. On the tab that shows the channel's info was a dollar sign. That suggests to me a pay channel.
I don't know what channel they are on (they are all on the same channel), and my meter died before I could find a channel I haven't seen before.
Does anyone know anything about this?
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Post by egnlsn on Apr 16, 2015 19:23:55 GMT -6
Apparently they're part of KUPX, channel 16. They come up as Showtime - 16.90; Starz! - 16.95; & Airbox - 16.96. All of them are scrambled channels.
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Post by CAwasinNJ on Apr 16, 2015 22:35:39 GMT -6
I'm almost positive that's Airbox. Does the STB manual mention anything about that?
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Post by egnlsn on Apr 17, 2015 15:16:32 GMT -6
Yeah, I discovered that. I don't know why anybody would want to pay for stereo in 480i.
Wonder why they don't offer the service since they're broadcasting it anyway.
No, the manual doesn't say anything about it. USDTV didn't make it here -- I doubt that AirBox will. At least with USDTV you got a bunch of channels, not just 3.
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Post by CAwasinNJ on Apr 18, 2015 3:29:55 GMT -6
As I understand it Airbox is mostly in MPEG4 so it won't show up on a regular STB. The regular broadcasts are MPEG2. The third channel I believe is where multiple other services live. I think you need to buy a STB from Airbox itself to get access to any of it, and your box is just trying to make sense out of what it sees. My STB can't see anything on 16.x other than the 6 free to air streams.
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Post by egnlsn on Apr 18, 2015 9:41:34 GMT -6
Rat Shack sells their STBs for $100. While the programming may be broadcast in several markets, Houston appears to be the only one where you can actually subscribe.
From another page: "a new subscription service called AirBox is transmitting several scrambled and unscrambled streams on subchannels of Ion stations nationwide. These streams are in MPEG4 format, so your current set won’t be able to decode them, even if your set can lock onto the subchannel."
It looks like they also do H.264 (with AAC audio) in addition to MPEG4 in some areas.
I'm getting to like this STB even better than at first. I first liked it because of the price tag and its capability to do ATSC and QAM. Now, I'm reading that it does MPEG-2, MPEG-4, H.264, VC-1 (formerly known as WMV), DivX, and MKV.
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Post by CAwasinNJ on Apr 18, 2015 21:38:58 GMT -6
MPEG4 is a container. H.264 is a codec. Technically you can put other codecs in an MPEG4 container, but it's almost always H.264 in my experience. In this case they probably mean the same thing.
An STB that does MKV? That's very interesting. We know what those are used for. <g>
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dspete
Silver Level Member
Listening to 102.5 KBBL with Troy McClure
Posts: 296
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Post by dspete on Apr 19, 2015 18:23:01 GMT -6
Well I can actually say I was a subsriber to USDTV and really liked it!!! But to me it was before it's time I really feel that if it was offered again and pushed it may make it with all the cable cutting going on and it also had the ESPN channels.
So basically I have the same package again at $20.00 a month with the new Sling TV but the upside of the old USDTV was it was OTA instead of streaming which I have had some buffering probs with Sling TV not alot but some.
Wish I could cut Crumcast and be lucky enough to have Google moving into the SLC valley but I'm not
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