mobilenvidia

TVNZ broadcasts digital TV on Optus B1, same Sat as Sky. Someother FTA channels are on here as well, but pretty useless. Hopefully some more channels will come up in April, but we are so far behind. NZ is just going Digital and Aussie is going HD, where did I put my club in my cave ?

The problenm is even worse here in NZ. Most STB's don't even allow for GMT+13 (day light saving) So I have to set mine to manual and then set the time and date. BUT the EPG seems to be a day behind and displays the day before's programs. I assume the satellite is still a day behind in it's clock and uses that day for it's programming. Must try and set the STB a day ahead and see what happens. A bit annoying but when displaying the info for current channel this is corrent.

I have just added a passive (Intel 486) heatsink to the 5518 Chipset of my Comstar 8700P PVR. I used some thermal compound to stick the heatsink to the Chipset. Then grabbed a 60mm case fan and screwed this to the inside of the lid, the holes in the lid allow for air flow and the ability to screw the fan to it as well. I used 4x3mm rubber spacers to make a gap for the fan to suck the air in from the top and then blow it onto the Chipset and the power heat sink right beside it. So the fan is pushing air down onto the chipset and outwards onto the Motherboard hearsinks and capacitors. The whole arrangement fits very nicely. I then modified the IDE power cable for the Hard Drive and added the 12v power needed for the case fan. So a constant 12v full speed fan results, now the fan also runs in standby mode as the power is always supplied to the HD, a little odd but I can live with that. I bough this PVR real cheap minus a Hard Drive, I have a 30GB spare laptop drive. I got some 3.5" drive rails and mounted these accross the 2.5" drive (normally these go length ways) I then screwed the 2 rails to the lid of the PVR as well (did have to make 2 new holes for this. I now have a fully functional PVR with cooling. No more PVR crashing and being able to make toast on the lid with all that heat. There is now a differnence in each end of the machine the HD end is now just warm and the Chipset/fan end is cool. I keep my PVR in an enclosed cabinet and the fan seems to make all the difference. Next time I pull the PVR apart I must take some piccies. Next project is to try and update firmware to something more recent. Anybody with a STi5518 Firmware in URT format ? Mine is dated June 03. One happy camper

My Comstar 8700P PVR gets hot really hot. Hot enough to cause visual and audio problems. It being in the middle of summer and inside a cabinet with a DVD-R just below it isn't helping. I've taken the lid of to help ease the burden but after a few hours the problems begin. Now when I remove the Hard Drive this makes little difference, although I am using a laptop HD, so not much power consumed. Am now looking at either adding a heatsink/fan to the Chipset or a case fan to the lid to get some air flow.