Basically the BT vision box represented something of a crunch point for the TV stack, particularly in terms of plugs. I have a long-lead gang plug that has six sockets and surge protection and in days gone past this was plenty for the TV corner. However, just recently I've added a few things to it that meant I've actually changed another ganger off it too.
But even with this extra capacity I didn't have a slot for the BT vision box. Part of the problem has become redundancy versus convenience.
A while back I decided to get Blu-Ray, but I was not keen on the players and proper multi-region machines cost an absolute fortune. There are machines where, like with some DVD players, you could essentially 'crack' them to be multi-region, but this generally involves farting about with firm-ware that you constantly have to update.
My solution then was to get a PC I could use as a media centre. I blogged at the time how this turned out to be a huge faff as well, but I've come to a point of it working okay.
Now being what it is this PC can obviously play multi-region DVDs, but because of the faff involved I ended up keeping my multi-region DVD player. I'm not really explaining this very well. Basically when trying to add the BT vision box I already had these electrical devices to account for:
A 6-point surge protected ganger with the following plugged in:
- TV
- PVR
- DVD player
- Dolby digital Amp
- Sub-Woofer
- four point ganger
The four plug ganger had the PC plugged in but meant I could also plug in the following as needed:
- 2 * lamps on timers (my landlord is paranoid about security and likes me to have these on during winter)
- Bass guitar amp
- VCR (yes, kicking it old school)
So as you can see at worst case that adds up to more sockets that I had available. In practice I never needed all things on at all times, but faffing about around the back of stuff to unplug things (and making sure you got the right plug!) was a pain.
There were also a couple of other issues. Firstly my picture through my PVR (via the aerial input) has been quite poor lately. It has a lot of interference and no amount of switching plugs and cables seemed to fix it. The solution was simple - use the SCART, but they were in an unknown box in the shed.
Secondly I don't use my VCR at all - now that we've switched over to digital I don't need to keep it as a back-up.
Thirdly there was the redundancy of having the DVD player and the PC.
And lastly my Amp has only 2 optical digital inputs. As such a bit of rationalisation was in order and I decided to have a bit of a clean-up too.
I've taken the VCR out of the loop, but in the end I decided not to get rid of the DVD player. Instead I've switched the optical cable it had to the box. My theory now is that if I want to just quickly watch a DVD the player is there, but if I want to watch it properly with the full sound thing I will have to use the PC.
Hopefully as I get used to it I will find the DVD becomes properly redundant like the VCR. However, part of the issue there is I've been using a wireless mouse and keyboard and while the keyboard works well, the mouse is a pain as I like to take the batteries out and that means re-synching it every time I use it.
I also found my other SCART cables and plugged the PVR in via SCART. The noise is all gone and the picture is a little better, though as I was afraid it has a few issues with up-scaling, but then that's a pretty standard issue many people have.
So there you have it - my only plugging in I need to do is for the base amp / lamps and I'm fine with those. Although as mentioned yesterday the BT box's LEDs are incredibly bright and it's weirdly fronted so I can't easily block the light. I may try and stick some tape over it (I'm unsure if this is where the receiver is for the remote signal) or simply plug it in when needed.
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