Panasonic rolls out iPlayer update for 2009 Freesat TVs

Update: adds Twitter too

Panasonic has just rolled out the long-awaited update to 2009 Freesat TVs, to enable users to access BBC iPlayer via the red button service.

However, it’s not immediately obvious to users – if you go to the Setup menu and tell the set to look for new software, it won’t find any, as it doesn’t appear to be broadcast “over the air”, that is via the satellite signal.

Instead, you need to start the VieraCast function by pressing the dedicated button on the remote control, and you’ll then see a screen telling you there’s new software available. Click OK, then select Yes, and the software will download via your internet connection. So, you’ll obviously need the TV connected to the net to download the update, but you have to do that for iPlayer anyway (and see this article for my recommendations on how to connect up a set).

I’ve tried this on my set, which is one of the V10 models. I’d love to hear from other people with 2009 models, so we can establish whether or not the update is available across all the VieraCast models from that year.

When you’ve updated, your set’s software version will be 2.303.

Now you can tweet from your TV! Panasonic's Twitter client, shown here running on a 2009 V10 series Freesat TV

This update also adds a Twitter client to the set, which is a surprise – I thought that it would only feature on 2010 models, which have USB ports and keyboard support. But you’ll find Twitter in there too, and you can compose messages, if somewhat laboriously, using the numeric keypad on the remote control.

Thanks to GreenBars on the Digital Spy forums for the heads up on iPlayer.

More pricing madness with ebooks

I’ve just been looking for some books to pop on my Sony Reader for a forthcoming trip. I was going to get them from the Overdrive Library – I’m in Hackney, so there’s a small selection of titles available – but the website wasn’t letting me log on.

So, I decided to have a look at the WH Smith site, for a change, rather than Waterstones. It reminded me, once again, why I tend to use Waterstones, which is only mildy annoying to navigate, as opposed to the out and out bonkers train wreck of the WH Smith ebooks site. What’s wrong, for instance, with using sensible words like “Author” when you’re searching? Who on earth thought referring to “Creator” would make things sound more friendly? I could go on at length about the awfulness of the Smiths site, but I’ll save that for another day.

The main point of this is book prices. As I mentioned before, in the face of Amazon’s arrival in the UK, the prices at Waterstones appear to have gone up. They told me that, of course, some of the titles might have been on promotion when I bought them, especially if they were new releases.

Ok, so how about “The Fuller Memorandum” by Charles Stross? That was published in July of this year; it’s £4 at WH Smith or Amazon, and £7.54 at Waterstones.

And the ebook of Peter James’ “Dead Like You”, published in June this year? That has an RRP of £18.99, which is excessive for an eBook however you look at it, in my view. At Waterstones, they think they’re doing you a favour by discounting it to £13.29, while at WH Smith you can just pay £6.46 instead, and £6.44 at Amazon.

Two other titles for my reader, “A Quantum Murder” by Peter F Hamilton, £7.54 at Watersones, £4.00 at the Amazon and WH Smith. Stieg Larsson’s “Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” is £5.49 at Waterstones, £2.72 at WH Smith, and £2.68 at Amazon.

Total price for these four books? I paid £17.18 at WH Smith; if I had a Kindle, I’d have saved six pence. And if I’d gone to Waterstones, it would have cost me £33.86, or £16.68 more; that’s a 49% saving.

You can argue that competition is healthy, and the great thing about ePub and devices such as the Sony Reader is that you can shop around for your books. You could also say that, when companies like Waterstones charge so much more for books, it’s a damn good thing too.

FreeviewHD is giving away boxes on Twitter

For those who’ve missed it, Freeview HD is running a competition on twitter at the moment. It’s running until the 2nd of September, and the winners will be announced next Friday (3rd September). There will be five winners (one a day), each of whom will receive a Freeview HD box – though not one I’ve reviewed, so I can’t tell you how good it is; it’s a bargain basement model, though.

Full details are on this page. Essentially, you need to follow FreeviewHD on Twitter and retweet a particular message to your followers. I won’t quote the message here, because I never shop at the supermarket concerned, and I’m not about to give them publicity on my blog.

4TV postscript

Pretty much as I predicted, Beko – the company that’s now owner of the Digifusion name – is not going to produce a firmware update to make the old PVRs use the standard Freeview EPG.

Some owners on Digital Spy are reporting that Beko is offering £70 to owners of some models of PVR, in exchange for the old units, as a gesture of goodwill. The offer depends on the serial number of your unit, and essentially only applies to those sold after Beko acquired the assets of Digifusion.

The Beko contact page is here.

If you want to recap the whole tale, this is a good place to start.

FreeviewHD Content protection rolled out

According to my sources at the BBC, an update to the FreeviewHD programme guide data is being rolled out at the moment. This update is the implementation of the Huffman-encoded EPG tables, which are part of the Freeview HD content protection system that I’ve written about here and here.

The theory is that as part of the approval for the Freeview HD badge, equipment will already have the ability to decode the EPG built in, and so most people should not notice any change.

The change hasn’t been done in one go, and is apparently rolling out around the country; I don’t have a schedule yet, or details of which transmitters have been changed over, but I do know that the plan is that the switchover will conclude in November if all goes well.

However – there’s always one of those, isn’t there? – there have been some reports on internet forums that the change has caused some problems with equipment, and specifically with the new Humax HDR Fox T2. I’m unable to confirm these at the moment, but I will update this post as soon as I get information back from Humax.

I’ve got a Humax here, and the EPG still works just fine. What has been suggested on some forums is that where the new EPG has been rolled out, the search function no longer works on the Humax. I can certainly confirm that the search doesn’t work on the unit I have , but since I hadn’t tried it until today, I can’t honestly say whether or not anything has changed in that regard, though posts elsewhere on the net, such as AV Forums, suggest that to be the case.

So, content protection is being rolled out as I write; it’s not everywhere yet, but I shall try to get more details as soon as I can. In the meantime, I’d be most interested to hear from anyone who is experiencing problems with the EPG or EPG related functions on Freeview HD equipment, which weren’t evident a little while ago.

Update, 1945, Thurs: I’ve just had work from Humax that the issue some users are having with search does indeed appear to be related to the compressed SI data, and that they will be looking at issuing an update to the HDR Fox T2 in September. I’ll note also, since my review’s not yet been published, that this issue aside, I’ve been quite impressed with the box. So if you can live without the keyword search, don’t let it put you off.

Quick anti-spam hacks for phpBB

A little off topic this, but I thought I’d share with people. One of the sites I run has a forum that, because of pressures of time, is still running phpBB version 2. It’s going to be upgraded to version 3 shortly, but I’ve not quite found the time.

I already have a quick hack in place that checks the IP address being used for registration; periodically I download a Geographic IP address database from Software 77, and load it onto my server. A quick lookup then lets us display a different message to people from certain countries (essentially, anywhere outside the EU, Australia and New Zealand) letting them know their account has to be approved by an admin.

The main bit of this particular hack is a function called untrustedIP, which returns TRUE if the IP address appears (GEO-IP mapping isn’t exact) to be from a country where we’ve either had lots of spammers, or where the things talked about on the forum aren’t relevant. This has succeeded in keeping the forum pretty spam free over the last few years.

In the common.php file, I have this code:

// this is a GEO-IP hack for country related authorisation

// query the database for the user ip address, and set the auth options

// based on the permitted countries

if (untrustedIP($client_ip)) {

 $board_config['require_activation'] = USER_ACTIVATION_ADMIN ;

}

// end of the GEO-IP hack

That’s fine, as far as it goes, at the cost of extra work keeping the database up to date, and authorising people who might be from elsewhere. Anyone who wants to code for the function, and the database structure, let me know. Or upgrade to phpBB3, which is more sensible.

But recently, I’ve seen even more registrations than usual, and some of these don’t even seem bothered about posting their spam to the forum – they don’t post, even if they are from IP addresses in the UK. Their main aim is to get the links to their crappy websites into the forum memberlist, which is visible to everyone (there are other hacks that make it visible to only people who are logged in, but I’ve not bothered with those).

As a general rule of thumb, these days I take the view that anyone who enters an ICQ number when they sign up to the forum is a spammer. No one else seems to use it anymore. So, there’s long been a warning on the sign up page that if you do enter a website or ICQ number when you register, your account may be deleted for being a spammer. (You can always enter it later, if you want).

Given the increasing number of spammers doing this, I’ve now made another quick hack. In the includes/usercp_register.php file you’ll find a bit of code that looks like this (line breaks added for clarity):

else if ( $mode == 'register' )
 {

if ( empty($username) || empty($new_password) ||
     empty($password_confirm) || empty($email))

I’ve simply changed the if statement, adding two new conditions to it, between the last two brackets :

|| !empty($icq) || (!empty($website)

The effect of that is to tell people they’ve forgotten to fill in a compulsory field, if they enter anything in the ICQ or website field. It’s not the best message, but I said this was a quick hack. And I already have a note on that page telling people not to put anything in those two fields. I don’t particularly care if spammers get confused, either.

FreeviewHD surround sound equipment list upated

Another small update to my list of Freeview HD equipment that can provide surround sound, to add the Humax HDR-Fox T2 to the list of equipment.

For those who are new to this site, essentially for technical reasons, if you connect your Freeview HD box to your surround sound system, you may not actually get anything more than stereo, unless you buy one of the products that is included on my list.

For more details, and a glossary of some of the jargon involved, the best place to start reading is probably this post.