Is there anyway of getting BBC Paraliment in full screen on freeview? For me it comes thru like a teletext page with writing and the picture only being a small part of the screen. Is there anyway of making it fill the screen?
It fills the screen on SKY but were getting rid of it in less than a week and I want to know how I can see the later repeat of PMQ's each week from now on a bigger picture.
As far as I'm aware there is no way of doing this. The small picture is due to capacity limitations as the channel used by BBC Parlament is shared with the news multiscreen. There aren't any plans for it to go full screen any time soon either I'm afraid.
Is there anyway of getting BBC Paraliment in full screen on freeview? It fills the screen on SKY but were getting rid of it in less than a week and I want to know how I can see the later repeat of PMQ's each week from now on a bigger picture.
Any help much apericated
BBC Paraliment is FTA. You won't lose it just because you don't pay for Sky.
Is there anyway of getting BBC Paraliment in full screen on freeview? It fills the screen on SKY but were getting rid of it in less than a week and I want to know how I can see the later repeat of PMQ's each week from now on a bigger picture.
Any help much apericated
BBC Paraliment is FTA. You won't lose it just because you don't pay for Sky.
Yep - BBC One, Two, Three, Four, CBBC, CBeebies, Parliament, News 24, BBCi, ITV1, ITV2, ITV3, ITV4, Sky News, CNN (last time I looked) and most of the shopping channels, and quite a few of the other low-rent entertainment channels are all FTA - and will continue without a Sky viewing card.
Channel Four and Five are FTV - and if you keep your Sky card in your receiver when you stop subscribing you should continue to be able to receive them as well.
E4 is, or was, a Sky subscription channel even though it is FTA on Freeview, as are UK History and FTN ISTR. Can't remember what More 4 is on Satellite.
We are going to have freeview with a hard drive after sky is gone in less than a week so I coukd just record the daily politics on BBC2 however they are buggers for cutting it short on there.
With such a small screen on freeview tho, I can't tell if the backbencher talking is Labour, Tory or Lib Dem so don't know if to boo or cheer them...
notes with regret that BBC Parliament is currently broadcast on Freeview in a quarter screen format using a shared channel
decoded by an MHEG which not all decoders can handle
; and therefore urges the Government to ensure that BBC Parliament is given its own full bandwith, full screen channel on Freeview at the earliest possible date.
The situation now, where boxes with no MHEG support cannot get BBC Parliament, was not always that way. When the quarter screen was first added (a huge step up from the old days - until 2002 it was broadcast on DTT in *audio only* with no picture whatsoever!) it was simply broadcast in the quarter screen format with the MHEG overlaid.
Boxes which did not support MHEG simply wouldn't show the 'packaging'; the picture itself was always there.
This changed when the BBCi news multiscreen was added. This broadcasts on the same videostream as BBC Parliament. Initially, the appropriate MHEG overlay simply masked out whatever you weren't supposed to be seeing - so until the MHEG loaded, you'd see BBC Parliament and both news streams on screen at the same time. Boxes with no MHEG would just permanently see all three feeds on screen at the same time.
However, if you were a non-MHEG person, you could still pick which stream you wanted to listen to through the language settings which switched the audio around between the three streams.
The present situation, in which you must have an MHEG-compatible box in order to see BBC Parliament (and the news screens) is only an artificial restriction introduced to make the presentation of these channels look better. There is no reason at all why they can't go back to the old way of doing things and offer pictures for all.
Of course, channel 302, the second 'interactive stream' is seldom used except when a major event is on (this is why community channel is able to timeshare with it). There is no reason why the 'proper' version of BBC Parliament couldn't be carried here when 302 is available (in order to make this accessible to the luddites, they need only include a 'press red for full screen picture' option on channel 81 which changes to channel 302 when the full screen channel is available).
