Can anyone confirm is Xing He, Celestial and Shuang Xing open up for free to all users not subscribed to it during CNY? When will the free offer end?

Hmm that's weird, heard from a friend he said he can watch these 3 channels during CNY which normally locked. I wonder how.

This post has been edited by frontierzone: Feb 1 2014, 09:13 PM

I noticed that in Astro's in-house channels on SD, there are certain shows that they broadcast which the quality is better than the quality of the commercials/some other shows on the same channel. This to me, means that the quality isn't determined by the channel, at least the in-house channels. They probably encode different videos using different settings or some other things, hence there are some video that appear much sharper and less pixelated than the rest. However, the same cannot be said for channels not operated by Astro, eg. CCTV, etc. One of the local stations, ntv7 has one of the poorest quality, the video colour is significantly dark and faded. CCTV, you can notice most of the smallish subtitles are hard to read, as they are so pixelated. And a large portion of Astro's pixelation actually can be seen as horizontal lines across. It's like the entire picture consists of visible horizontal strips put layered together. What do you guys think? I'm hoping since they have some shows with acceptable quality on SD, why not ensure the same consistency across all shows and channels. I'm quite disappointed with the every so often, overly pixelated and colour fade issues.

This post has been edited by frontierzone: Feb 11 2014, 01:12 AM

Asteruk just updated their website, revised interface for the tv guides and such - not major revision though the colours and such changed. The old interface was crappy to max, lags and hard to navigate.

There seems to be a bug in the decoder software. Whenever those channels have a certain 'red dot' app banner, once you reached the channel via FAV, will not be able to navigate to next FAV channel. Anyone know if this can be solved?

Normally it will happen like this. I FAV until the channel that has the red button, if don't stay on that channel too long, that is just FAV to the next channel, it will work. But if you have settled there for a second or two, it will start to get awareness that there is some interactive thing attached to it (the red dot). Once that happen you not be able to move away, it will load the app in the background. Will need to wait till red dot appears, in the meantime even volume control can't work. This will last a couple of seconds maybe 10 secs. After the red dot appears, then can use Back to hide the red dot, but I don't think the the FAV to the next works for me at this point. I will have to go down or up one channel using (-/+) and then back to the channel with the red dot, quickly press Fav then it will reach the next Fav channel. Also, on red dot channels, after using Back to hide the red dot, the volume On-Screen indicator will not appear anymore. When increase or decrease vol, the volume bar will no longer appear, although the sound still decrease/increase based on your button press.

Quite annoying, not really interested in the red dot app at all, if only can disable that for all channels will be good. Otherwise, the bug needs to be fixed. It's been there for a long time.

This post has been edited by frontierzone: Jun 2 2014, 11:24 AM