FAQ

If you currently have a Sky dish you do not need to replace anything. You simply unplug the Sky box and replace with the new satellite or combo receiver from SaorTV. If you dont have a dish currently we sell great value dish packs with all fittings included.

Shipping charges are calculated based on weight and destination on checkout. We use An Post registered post for small and international items. We use DPD courier for all other national deliveries. Shipping costs via courier are a flat rate €9.99 for shipping of multiple items up to 20kg (32 county service). An Post shipping costs will vary.

Yes all areas that capture your information are protected by SSL. We use Paypal and Moneybookers as our payment engines. They are the largest and most respected payment processing companies in the world. We do not hold any credit card details in SaorTV.

We ship to most countries. We have recently lowered our international shipping costs.

Digital Terrestrial Television (DTT) is digital quality TV over a standard rooftop aerial. It is very similar to digital cable TV like Chorus/NTL and satellite digital TV like Sky Digital. It has the same attributes of these other digital TV formats: widescreen, high quality picture, detailed program guide with full 7 day listings, info button, digital teletext etc. DTT is broadcast from the same transmitters from which your old analog TV pictures were broadcast.

DVB-T is the digital broadcast standard for digital terrestrial television

• Digital Terrestrial TV = DVB-T/T2
• Digital Satellite TV = DVB-S/S2
• Digital Cable TV = DVB-C/C2

Irish DTT is the term being used to describe the free Irish digital terrestrial TV service consisting of the public service channels in TV and Radio (RTE1, RTE2, TV3, TG4, Radio 1, 2FM, Lyric and RNaG). RTE have announced on 19 Jan 2010 that the Irish public service DTT will be branded Saorview. The public service channels are 100% free and require no subscription. It was planned to add more free channels to this service including an arts channel and an oireachteas channel but these are now in doubt due to the recession. The official service is not launched as of January 2010 but has been available in test mode since June 2008. The announcement of an official service launch is expected shortly.

MPEG4 is the encoding used for the picture transmission by RTE. It is a more advanced encoding than used previously in the UK and other countries (MPEG2) and it is more efficient with transmission bandwidth. Both Ireland the UK use DVB-T as the standard for transmission but Ireland use MPEG4 for encoding and the UK use MPEG2. To be able to receive a broadcast that is MPEG4 encoded your receiving equipment (TV tuner, combo box, terrestrial receiver) needs to be compliant with DVB-T and MPEG4. Almost all TV's sold in Ireland before 2008 are not MPEG4 compliant as they were built to the UK DVB-T/MPEG2 freeview specification. MPEG4 is backward compatible to MPEG2 so a TV that is MPEG4 can also receive MPEG2 broadcasts.

When purchasing equipment for use with Irish DTT you need to make sure it is both DVB-T and MPEG4 compliant.

The Broadcasting Commission of Ireland is currently (October 2009) in negotiations with Onevision (a consortium including Eircom, Setanta and TV3) to licence a Pay TV DTT service. This will launch on the same platform as the free public service channels but is not required to receive the free channels. The Pay TV DTT service is expected to launch in late 2010.

Freeview is a UK company and brand owned by BBC/ITV/C4/BSkyB and Arqiva for their version of Digital Terrestrial TV. Channels on UK Freeview are generally not receivable in Ireland except on the east coastline with high gain aerials and in border areas. See http://www.freeview.co.uk/ for some more on channels available on Freeview in the UK. All you need to receive the channels if you have coverage is a basic DVB-T set top box or a TV with an inbuilt DVB-T tuner. All channels on Freeview are FTA or free-to-air meaning no subscription or card is required. Irish DTT and Freeview are totally separate entities and use different video encoding standards (MPEG4 for Irish DTT and MPEG2 for UK Freeview). TV's sold in Ireland that are labelled compatible with Freeview are most often not compatible with Irish DTT. It is best not to use the term Freeview at all when referring to forms of TV service receivable in Ireland as it only causes confusion.

Freesat is essentially a complimentary satellite based service to Freeview also owned by a company jointly owned by the BBC and ITV. Freesat broadcasts on the Astra satellite (the same one Sky uses) and as a result Freesat as a service is fully receivable in Ireland. All you need is a satellite dish setup and freesat branded receiver. Humax, Grundig, Goodmans and Bush all make freesat branded receivers. You can get a full 7 day program guide and the boxes are also compatible with red button type services like BBC interactive. All channels on freesat are FTA also and do not need any subscription, cards, phone lines etc. Freesat carries high definition (HD) channels also like BBC HD and ITV HD. There is also a freesat personal video recorder (PVR) with 2 tuners to allow you to record one channel and watch another (the Humax Foxsat HDR). As freesat gives a full EPG you can plan recordings from the guide and execute other features like series link which users would be familiar with from Sky+. See http://www.freesat.co.uk for more information. Freesat and Satellite FTA are often confused which leads on to my next explanation.

Satellite Free-To-Air (FTA) is basically the collection of all channels that are possible to receive without subscription. This is not an organised service like Irish DTT, Freesat or Freeview rather a description for the use of a standard DVB-S satellite set top box to receive these FTA channels. As all the freesat channels are FTA you can pick all of these channels up with an FTA receiver but there are other channels not carried on the Freesat program guide that can be picked up on a satellite FTA receiver. There are limitations of satellite FTA over organised services like Freesat. For UK FTA channels you will only get Now and Next information on programming as opposed to 7 day listings on freesat. Also, red button type features are not available generally on FTA boxes. Note that there are different FTA receivers that are close to being able to interpret the freesat 7 day EPG. Also, FTA boxes have to be manually tuned and configured which is not required on freesat boxes. If a channel changes frequency (or transponder in satellite speak) it will need to be retuned. This happens automatically in freesat. See http://www.lyngsat.com/28east.html for a list of the channels available on FTA at the UK targetted satellite Astra 28.2E. FTA boxes can have PVR functionality also whether that is to an external drive or an internal drive. Some FTA boxes will have dual tuners which will allow you to record one channel while watching another. A Sky box with no subscription card can be used as a form of FTA satellite receiver.

Free-to-View (FTV) is a description generally used when referring to the Sky platform. This means that with the use of a UK free-to-view card a particular channel can be descrambled. UK free-to-view cards are available to all UK households at a nominal £20 fee. The idea is again to allow households to have an alternative to Freeview. Channels that are FTV on Sky but not FTA are Fiver, Five USA, Sky 3 and Channel4 HD. There were many more than this a few years back but over time and with the release of freesat FTV has become less important.

A combo box is one with at least 2 tuners, one for satellite and one for terrestrial (DTT). These boxes are generally also high definition capable. Once setup the channels are transparently received to the user and are represented on the same program guide.

The combo box has become more prominent with the advent of Irish DTT. Ireland has a very unique situation in terms of the availability of free to air TV from the UK over satellite. By combining DTT from the aerial and Satellite FTA channels from the dish Irish TV consumers now have a comprehensive set of TV channels available without any subscription. Prior to Irish DTT the only way to receive digital RTE/TV3/TG4 was to pay for it from Sky or UPC.

No, all channels listed are Free To Air and and no subscription is required. The unique feature of the combo box is that allows you to combine digitial terrestrial and satellite channels on one program guide seamlessly. There are boxes out there that steal cable and MMDS TV. The combo box is not one of these.

These boxes are very configurable. ITV HD is setup with parameters that wont allow it to be received on closed platforms like Sky but it can be configured on the MVision.

Yes, you can add and remove any channels you can receive. You can sort into favorites. You can then save your channel lists to a memory stick if you wish. We keep a full Irish channel list up to date on our forum http://www.saortv.com/forum. This is available to download for all who register with our site.

We will post all new software upgrades on our forum at http://www.saortv.com/forum. We will issue an email to all registered users of the forum notifying them of the new release.

All this information and instruction is available at our forum http://www.saortv.com/forum

You can receive channels from satellites all over the northern hemisphere. Ideally you need a motorised dish to make this possible. The MVision can control a motorised dish. You can also received encrypted channels on other satellites with the use of CAM modules and valid subscription cards.

Differences between Elite and Premium

• Premium has an internal drive bay to take a hard drive
• Premium has WifI
• Premium has a different remote that can act as a universal TV remote also
• Premium has an external power supply (runs a little cooler)
• Premium has a wide display for channel names on front of box
• Premium has a front and back USB, Elite has two at the back
• Elite has a smaller box

Both can take a hard wired internet connection and an external hard drive
Premium+ has in addition over Premium

• can do watch one record a different channel at same time (from different tuners)
• has hardware blindscan capability
• has an internal fan
• has an easy access panel on top of box for access to hard drive

Also, Premium+ does not have RF out for distribution of AZBox channel around the house (Elite and Premium only have this feature)