Virgin Media V6 Box released

[Smudger]

Looks pretty good, not sure if it's a bit late to the party though, with Sky Q having been around for a few months now...

http://www.techradar.com/news/televi...umours-1330039

If they price it well, I'm tempted...

And according to the article, it'll cost me £49.99. Hmm. I suppose the labels on my current Tivo remote have worn off...

[g8ina]

Me too Wait and see what happens over the next couple of months

[Smudger]

Just need to watch everything I've got on the old box. May take a while...

[Saracen]

I hope it's faster than my current Tivo which, especially since the recent UI upgrade, is SLOW. Sometimes doing 'anything' results in a completely blank screen for 30 to 40 seconds at a time. Sometimes it seems quick, other times it dan take over a minute to get a recording to play (from disk, not OnDemand). It can even take 30 seconds to a minute to go from watching a program (either live TV or recorded) to get into MyShows or the EPG.

It's not overly full either, with currently about 38% space used.

Anyone else noticing this? Or is it standard for an 18-month old (and therefore just out of contract minimum period)?

If it's faulty, I'll give VM a ring. If not, then as it's driving me nuts, I may just cancel altogether.

Oh, and I'm not really bothered about a V6 upgrade, either. I have no interest in 4k, now or in the medium term (until current TV packs up, at least), and there's not much on the feature list that would bother me, even for a free upgrade, and absolutely not if it entailed the old "new contract" trick. Recording 6 programs concurrently might be useful on occassion, but pretty infrequently, and nothing else lights my fire.

Mind you, a new remote would help as the old one is getting reluctant to work.

[Smudger]

I hope it's faster than my current Tivo which, especially since the recent UI upgrade, is SLOW. Sometimes doing 'anything' results in a completely blank screen for 30 to 40 seconds at a time. Sometimes it seems quick, other times it dan take over a minute to get a recording to play (from disk, not OnDemand). It can even take 30 seconds to a minute to go from watching a program (either live TV or recorded) to get into MyShows or the EPG.

It's not overly full either, with currently about 38% space used.

Anyone else noticing this? Or is it standard for an 18-month old (and therefore just out of contract minimum period)?

If it's faulty, I'll give VM a ring. If not, then as it's driving me nuts, I may just cancel altogether.

Oh, and I'm not really bothered about a V6 upgrade, either. I have no interest in 4k, now or in the medium term (until current TV packs up, at least), and there's not much on the feature list that would bother me, even for a free upgrade, and absolutely not if it entailed the old "new contract" trick. Recording 6 programs concurrently might be useful on occassion, but pretty infrequently, and nothing else lights my fire.

Mind you, a new remote would help as the old one is getting reluctant to work.

Yep, it's pretty standard, mine does the same. The V6 is supposed to be 10x faster (no-one has tested this claim) but I bet that if you threaten to leave, and get to retentions, they will probably give you one of these for free. The 4k element is only Netflix and Youtube at the moment, there's no live 4k content, so just the speed upgrade and 6 tuners would probably make it worthwhile, if it was a free upgrade.

[Saracen]

If it was free, and provided it wasn't used to extend the subscription minimum term, yes it probably would be. I do have a reservation or two about early adoption, though. I'd rather let others sort out the bugs

I did have VM (back in the NTL days) try that 'new contract, new 18 months' trick, and that was over a package change, not even a hardware upgrade. They didn't mention that on the phone, and I only picked it up because I carefully read the blurb they sent, and insisted they revoke the new package, remove the new 18 months and oh, by the way, cancel all services. I've only been back with them for 18 months but will not agree to a further 18 month lock-in.

Thanks for the comments, Smudger.

[Smudger]

Well, I've had mine in for about a fortnight now, and I'm quite happy with it. We kept the old Tivo and put that upstairs so that we could gradually watch and delete the stuff we have stored on it.

1st thing you notice, it's quick. Very quick. All the apps start straight away, no going to make a cup of tea while you wait for Netflix to start. The unified search thing is pretty good as well. I think it's on the normal Tivo as well, but it returns results much quicker on the new box. It's also able to view the Planet Earth 2 sample via iPlayer Beta, which is cool, and that's without a Panasonic screen.

It can also connect to the old box and stream recordings from there, which is handy, and was what tipped me towards going for it, as I wasn't going to go upstairs to watch what's on the old box.

Engineer visit was about an hour. I could have put it all in myself, but he tested the line and noticed there was a weakness there, so he put in a booster, and that seems to have improved the broadband as well! The remote is smaller by a fair amount, but it seems to be easier to reach things by instinct, without having to look at the thing. The alarm thing that helps you find it when a small person has done his best to hide it is quite handy as well.

All in all, I'm quite pleased with the new box.

[Ferral]

VM are finally coming to the town center area of where I live this year so am hoping it comes up to the village where I live in the next year or so. The broadband side of things round here is pretty naff at times, maximum we get is 25 Mbps and my son constantly streams and uses voice comms over XBox and ipad at the same time, needless to say he was crippling the bb so we had to get a second line in.

Currently we have Sky Q which we love, 2Tb box downstairs and a wireless mini box in the bedroom which is great for watching recordings and also live TV, thing we are wondering about is if you can get a second box like the Q Mini and stream live TV to it aswell as just the recordings, if you can we may change over to VM when they land here

[Smudger]

You can get a 2nd v6 box, which gives you 2tb in all, plus the ability to record 12 things at once. Although I've never come across a situation where there are 12 things on at the same time that I like, let alone want to record. The 2nd box costs an extra £5-8 a month, but it's free if you're on the VIP package. You would need to have the VM co-ax wired into wherever you need the 2nd box though. It does have wifi, but it needs the co-ax for the telly programs.

[Spud1]

VM are finally coming to the town center area of where I live this year so am hoping it comes up to the village where I live in the next year or so. The broadband side of things round here is pretty naff at times, maximum we get is 25 Mbps and my son constantly streams and uses voice comms over XBox and ipad at the same time, needless to say he was crippling the bb so we had to get a second line in.

Currently we have Sky Q which we love, 2Tb box downstairs and a wireless mini box in the bedroom which is great for watching recordings and also live TV, thing we are wondering about is if you can get a second box like the Q Mini and stream live TV to it aswell as just the recordings, if you can we may change over to VM when they land here

You could always just keep Sky Q and get broadband only from VM, best of both worlds for you then A friend of mine has one of these new VM boxes now and it's lightyears ahead of anything VM have put out before..but its still just not as intuitive as the Q boxes. It's like they have finally caught up to the Sky+HD boxes (but with 4k for some of the apps), but are still a few generations behind Sky. It's a shame as the quality of their boxes (and crucially, the software) has always put me off them and given Sky the lead (well that, and sky atlantic).

Still, you can have Sky Q from Sky and VM's broadband without issues, if thats your main problem.