More Virgin Trickery

Some more Virgin 'magicks': One good: one not so good

First the good.

In my ongoing quest to get a consistently decent internet connection, my conversation with Virginindia a week or so back resulted in another piece of equipment arriving at my door. This time it was a new Virgin Hub which replaces modem and wifi with a single piece of equipment (just adding the link there, I see there's also a 'Super Hub'!).

Scepticism about the likely efficacy of this new wunderbox and reluctance to spend the inevitable hour or so with Virginindia getting it working means I've dragged my feet over connecting it. I did so this morning with heavy heart and after a frustrating 90 minutes, it's connected, channel selected as guided, and it does seem to be giving me a better connection.

Virigin seem to give you a piece of equipment as if it cost no more than a second hand beach novel. So, if you're having connectivity issues, talk to Virgin and tell them your modem keeps going off and I imagine it won't be hard to finesse a new Virigin Hub.

Now the bad.

As part of Virgin's 'We love you really' package to me on my last complaint to them, they sold me a new Virgin Tivo at the knockdown price of £50 (free to new customers). I've never really liked the V+ Box so I was happy to take up their offer. Happy until I started using it, that is.

First, I'm not that sure about the user interface. It strikes me as a bit of a dog's breakfast; it's half Tivo and half Virgin.The Tivo half deals with the equipment settings and recording. It's pretty much unchanged from the format of the interface on the Tivo Box I ditched after starting my affair with V+ and works well (and, critically, includes the essential Tivo p'doop-p'doop noise as you enter a command).

So far so good. On to the Virgin half, which controls the channel selection, iplayer, films on demand and new Youtube, and Twitter interfaces. To me it looks like a beta (test) version. It has a scrappy look and the text is unnecessarily small. I don't like it. Why couldn't they just have mirrored the much better designed and proven Tivo interface? And, sorry to be picky, but both sides of the interface are red. Red? No one picks red for a user interface because it doesn't work well on any level.

Don't like it, but I can live with all of that. What's led me to unplug the new box and go home to my V+ Box is a dumb design short-cut that means it doesn't work properly if connected to your TV via a SCART socket. (I have to come out of the closet here and admit to being a CRT TV owner. Don't stone me. I've delayed replacing my fantastic old Sony CRT since, till recently it's been the equal of, or better than, the newer flat screens. It's now outclassed and needs replacing, but I'm eking a little more life out of the old dear yet a while.)

Reading round the grippingly exciting cable TV forums on the interwebs, it seems that the Virgin Tivo Box designers, for some reason, decided not to activate the connections to a couple of the SCART pins. This means that the TV ratio format doesn't autocorrect, and can only be manually corrected on some broadcasts. As a result the picture ratios are wrong; the picture is squeezed in at the sides and everyone looks like they're sucking lemons.

Now maybe, just maybe, I could live with that  if I was making a massive cost saving. But I'm not. I'm paying more for the privilege. My understanding is that there will be a software release to correct this before Christmas. Am I convinced? Mmmm.

In the meantime, be warned and for me, it's back to ole V+ Boxy-woxy.