eurovox and other cable/satelite boxes

[flashgordon]

there appears to be a number of adverts of these boxes on ebay does anyone have any info regarding these boxes.. I remember the drake anologue satellite recievers of old. and the pace ! when we first got connected to the ntl service i think we used a pace reciever. then a couple of years ago we became one of the pre-service customers. for the digital service. But had a few problems with the boxes and ended up with going through 3 boxes in less than 6 months. think the last one we had was either a sumsung or sanyo box. now after a break of three years gone back to ntl/virgin.. how many of you had the same prob ???

[Matt D]

If you get a satellite STB off Ebay or wherever, it'll only work with Sky Digital if it's a proper Sky STB, containing Sky's proprietary conditional access system. Perfectly fine to buy them (as when you get Sky, the STB is yours to keep, & later sell if you want), but your Sky smartcard would need to be paired with the STB (done via phoning Sky).

Non-Sky STBs won't work with Sky Digital...they'd only pick up the unencrypted channels on Astra (or wherever you point it).


As for cable STBs......

Non-ntl/TW/Virgin STBs won't work with Virgin Media.

Any 2nd hand ntl/TW/VM supplied STBs found on Ebay etc. are actually still the property of Virgin Media & cannot legally be bought & sold. They also will not work with Virgin, as box/card pairings are account specific & need to be registered & authorised by Virgin.


As for problems with ntl/Virgin STBs.....the Pace boxes are often quite unreliable AFAIK.