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TV tuning in France


Berniea

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I'm now in The Dordogne region of France, and up until we travelled from the Royan/La Rochelle the satellite dome (not sure what size the dish is but it's small) was just about managing to allow us to view the main UK tv channels.

We moved to St Foy Le Grand this morning, and now that we are much further south, the tv channels are understandably no longer working, with the exception of a couple. (strangely ITV1+1 worked but ITV1 didn't!)

Stupidly I decided to retune my TV, and now I've got hundreds of channels, but apart from the very first one in the huge list (BET:BlackEnt TV), none of them work.

 

The Freeview channels that I would expect to find in the list no longer appear i.e. BBC, ITV, Ch4, Etc.

My question is - what have I done to the TV tuning? Can I get back the Freeview channels I would expect to see while in France? Will I have to wait till I have a good satellite signal (when I move back into the Brittany region) and retune, or will I have wait till I'm back in blighty?

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Done the same myself - too eager to retune!

 

In short - you'll have to wait until you get back in to the Astra 2 footprint area to retune and see the freeview channels. If you have an Avtex TV the blank channels are all their preset channels that, as far as I know, you cannot uninstall. They will only work once you get back up north.

 

Alternatively, if you have good WiFi on the site then try using FilmOn free website British TV channels and if possible view them on your TV if you can link your WiFi tablet or even phone to the TV screen.

Have a look at the site here: https://www.filmon.com

 

This is how we watch when we get outside the Astra 2 satellite footprint in Spain for example. We have found that many campsites have recently boosted their WiFi service so it is possible to stream live TV via your laptop/tablet or even smartphone. If its a busy site however, you will struggle to get adequate signal strength to watch without it buffering. We also pay a monthly subscription to allow you to earmark programmes for later viewing, quite cheap and you can cancel the sub after one month.

 

 

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Presumably you were retuning a satellite receiver (so Freesat rather than Freeview) and I agree with the advice already offered, you will presumably need to get back under the Astra Northern Footprint in order to retune again., although when i've fallen for temptation and retuned, the usual ist of stations has survived.

 

My receiver has a choiceof "Preset tune" and Autotune" and I've never understood the difference or even which one to use - does anyone know?

 

And when I was in borderline reception in the Dordogne a few weeks ago I got several UK channnels between about 1pm and 7pm but none of them outside those hours.

 

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Thanks for the replies guys.

Ian - I tried the Filmon link and surprisingly it worked. I fully expected the internet speed to be way too slow but it worked for the 2minutes of free "sample" time that Filmon give.

If I buy a HDMI cable and run Filmon on my laptop and use the HDMI as the tv signal source, will this enable me to mirror the laptop screen and thereby have TV on the TV..... if that makes sense?

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