TheBox, a UK television torrent site which happened to be my go-to for Countdown and Deal Or No Deal reruns (as I\'m sure it also was for many forum members), is closing:
The End. @ 2013-08-28 23:49:44 GMT (< 1 min ago)
It is with great sadness that we must announce the closure of TheBox.bz, effective on September 1st. This decision has not been an easy one but, given the increasingly hostile climate towards torrent sites as of late, we feel it\'s a necessary move.
On September 1st, the torrent section of the website will be deactivated. As TheBox has always been as much about community as about sharing, forums and private messages will remain functional for a while longer. Afterward, we will securely wipe all account details before retiring the server for good.
Discussion and farewells are welcome here
Thank you for being a part of TheBox. It\'s been a fun ride.
~ Tbz Staff
That is unfortunate. I was and am a big fan of their site. I\'ve since started using a UK VPN account to stream many of the shows I want to watch from across the pond so I haven\'t used it as much recently but it was great to have.
So what\'s left/reliable for UK torrents? Anything? I miss UK Nova.
tvchaosuk ... regs are currently open. They\'ve got fairly decent game/quiz coverage, with some oddities: For instance, Take on The Twisters is up daily, but Countdown appears to be missing. Only Connect and The Cube are covered, so I\'m happy. (And it\'s not like either show is ever going to be aired on any channel in the USA, so my ethics meter doesn\'t even register.) :)
Would be great, except for the fact I get a \"PERMISSION DENIED\" every time I try to login.
MediaHint for Chrome allows you to access the online players for BBC, Channel 4, ITV, and just about anything else you may need. It really sort of unlocks the world of streaming TV.
There appears to be a Firefox version as well.
Wow. Installed it, went to 4od, clicked on Countdown, and it immediately started playing. This is a godsend.
(Incidentally, when did the format shrink?)
Wow. Installed it, went to 4od, clicked on Countdown, and it immediately started playing. This is a godsend.
(Incidentally, when did the format shrink?)
Back in March, to make room for another commercial -- around the same time they switched to LED screens for the numbers board and score displays.
They took out a letters game and inserted a numbers game, which means that both contestants get to pick two numbers games each. Still 15 rounds, though, even if the show itself is a minute shorter.
Works great with BBC, not so well with CBC, alas. :(
Does your provider not have CBC?
CBC is exclusive to Comcast in our area; the one thing I really hated about switching to FiOS.
MediaHint. Who\'d have known.
I would like for there to be a website somewhere that lists All The Useful Tools You Don\'t Know About.
I would like for there to be a website somewhere that lists All The Useful Tools You Don\'t Know About.
That used to be Lifehacker before Gina Trapani left and it all went to shiat.
Has anybody had any luck with ITV\'s player? It asks me for a postal code. \'Twas nice to see Countdown just now.
Media Hint is a great find. Thanks Christian.
Has anybody had any luck with ITV\'s player? It asks me for a postal code. \'Twas nice to see Countdown just now.
SE10AA is a totally valid postcode for London. IYKWIM. AITTYD.
Thank you. Lemon comes through in the clutch. Now I can get my fill of Take on the Twisters The Chase, whose new season starts next week. And The Cube, whenever that returns.
Oh my goodness, Media Hint is an amazing find. Thank you so much, Christian. My source for Pointless episodes has been lacking as of late and this is amazing that I can watch them directly off the site now.
Okay, tech question for UN-tech guy :
If I buy chromecast - can i watch/ feed this UK stuff on my tv?
thank you in advance.
If I buy chromecast - can i watch/ feed this UK stuff on my tv?
Funny you should mention that, because I just got one myself and have been playing with it all week.
Right now, the technical answer is (under the right circumstances) yes, but the practical answer is no. I\'ll explain and try not to drown you in technojargon while I do it:
So the Chromecast does two things in two different ways: one, for services that it supports (and right now that means Netflix, YouTube, and the Google Play media services; more are coming and eventually there will be a way for any service to support the Chromecast on their own if they want to), it can be told to stream and play back content on its own, meaning you find whatever the thing is on your phone or PC that you want to watch, you tap the Chromecast icon, and that basically says \"Okay, Chromecast, pop open a Web page and load this up for me, and take it from here.\" And at that point your phone or PC acts as a remote control; you can pause and scrub through the video and change volume and such, and since the Chromecast is doing all of the work you can even close the app and do something else (say, a call comes in) and it will keep going and you can come back and start controlling it again at any time.
The *other* thing it does: you can load up anything in the Chrome browser, a Web page, a video, a blog, a game of Bejeweled, this very site, whatever the hell you want, and tap the Chromecast icon and it will mirror that page on your TV screen, but all of this is being pushed from your computer over your network and the Chromcast displays it as it\'s sent. This is where the \"technically\" comes in: yes, you could do this with a non-supported video service and yes, the video will display on your TV if you set it up right. (Basically, you have to be running the video *in the tab*; you can\'t go full-screen with the video.) Realistically, though, the performance is dreadful; over my wireless, I\'m pretty sure I could draw the pictures faster than it displays them. I don\'t know if it\'s faster when the PC in question is wired instead of wireless (and therefore more wireless bandwidth is available for the actual pushing of the bits to the Chromecast) because I haven\'t dragged the thing out to try it on my living room TV yet, but even if it is, I doubt it\'s usably so; it might jump to 10 frames per second up from the 2 or 3 (at best) I\'m seeing now.
Now, it\'s a very young product, and firmware is going to upgrade and performance is very likely to improve over time (and that\'s why I bought it; I want to see what happens), and for YouTube and Netflix it is a ridiculously frictionless experience; I have a *lot* of devices capable of both services but the Chromecast is far and away the easiest and fastest to use. But for the precise function you are asking about: not happening right now.
(That said, are you using a laptop? A single HDMI cable will do *exactly* what you want to flawlessly.)
Got it - and thank you for that.
I\'m using a desktop - that\'s so i\'m hardwired into the house - but not hooked up to the tv (obviously).
Would I be better off with an Apple TV for this? I\'d like to watch cbs.com shows up on the big screen, and have netflix. if i can watch Countdown since i downloaded media hint , even better.
Right now - i have nothing, not even netflix. i\'d like to get away from a $300 cable bill if possible (2 phones and internet with that).
Advise please. grateful.
So I got my Chromecast working with my main (Ethernet-wired) PC, and was surprised to find that the experience was a LOT better. The video and audio got out of sync a few times, but that was fixable just by stopping and restarting the cast, and the video was totally watchable, considering I was streaming data from the UK. I wouldn\'t want to *depend* on it, but it was a totally usable experience whereas casting from my laptop was very much not. We watched part of a Countdown, an Only Connect, and a Pointless on it; all worked fine.
The key is that you aren\'t using the same wireless channel to get the data to your computer that you are using to also get the data to the Chromecast, so if you have your desktop machine on Ethernet, that should be a big help. I have also read that processor power has a bit to do with it, and this is a new machine I built last Christmas that I just upped to 16GB of RAM, so it\'s pretty beefy to start with.
CBS is the toughest nut to crack because they aren\'t playing nice with Hulu whereas most of the other majors are. I understand there is a way to watch through the Plex channel on a Roku, but that would involve installing Plex Media Server on your PC as well. Not OVERLY difficult, mind you, but a bit of a hack.
I would get a Roku before an Apple TV, if you were going to go the \"dedicated streaming box\" route. Apple TV REEEEEEALY wants you to buy things from iTunes and I don\'t know if I\'d want to be locked behind their walled garden; at that point you might as well be tied to cable again.
The big takeaway I\'m trying to get across here is that Chromecast isn\'t the magic bullet everyone wants it to be - but it *could* be, depending on how Not Evil Google wants to be about it.
I would get a Roku before an Apple TV, if you were going to go the \"dedicated streaming box\" route. Apple TV REEEEEEALY wants you to buy things from iTunes and I don\'t know if I\'d want to be locked behind their walled garden; at that point you might as well be tied to cable again.
Of course I would never advocate such a lawless thing, but it\'s relatively simple to run XBMC on a \"fixed\" (and, hence, no-warranty) Apple TV2, which unlocks the world of saved/downloaded media from outside the walled garden. Watching Cube China on one right now!
Of course I would never advocate such a lawless thing, but it\'s relatively simple to run XBMC on a \"fixed\" (and, hence, no-warranty) Apple TV2, which unlocks the world of saved/downloaded media from outside the walled garden. Watching Cube China on one right now!
For you and I who have a modicum of technical savvy, yes, it\'s probably relatively simple. For the majority of consumers who buy a box off of the shelf and are lost unless it Just Works, not so simple.
Yeah, for the life of me, I have tried other extensions as well, and I can\'t seem to crack CBC. And with Battle of the Blades starting back up I would *really* like to.
So far, BBC player has been friendly, but there was no joy with Amazing Race: Canada, Deal Down Under or The Mole: AUS.
There may be other methods to this approach, as I have been able to enjoy Mole Aus season 6 for a little while now, although it\'s not as good as past seasons frankly. Feel free to PM if you\'d like to know what I\'ve been doing.
The other methods, to my knowledge, involve paying for a VPN service, or using free ones that go up and down more often than Miley Cyrus\'s bottom and perform more poorly than I do in the bed-...erm, nevermind. :)
If there\'s something else easier and free-er, we\'d all love to know about it, I\'m sure.
Media Hint makes \"Pointless\" a daily show in my house. Has anyone tried to download any shows for the BBC iPlayer? Any success playing them?
Josh
Media Hint makes \"Pointless\" a daily show in my house. Has anyone tried to download any shows for the BBC iPlayer? Any success playing them?
Josh
Yes. I have seen That Puppet Game Show via iPlayer.
Media Hint makes \"Pointless\" a daily show in my house. Has anyone tried to download any shows for the BBC iPlayer? Any success playing them?
Josh
Yes. I have seen That Puppet Game Show via iPlayer.
Ok... I installed the iPlayer on the laptop and I\'m trying to download Pointless... and they just sit there and do nothing. Help? :)
I think what might be lost here is that Josh is asking about the download option rather than streaming.
I think what might be lost here is that Josh is asking about the download option rather than streaming
Has downloading worked for anyone else? The stream works wonderfully, unlike that all \'Plinko\' show they attempted last week on \"Price\" :P
I was just looking for a bit more flexibility, that\'s all.
You\'re already able to watch something that, strictly speaking, you shouldn\'t be able to watch.I was just looking for a bit more flexibility, that\'s all.
University Challenge, Only Connect, and Mastermind. I\'m hoping BBC Radio\'s Brain of Britain gets to the iPlayer.
Subscribe to BBC Radio 4\'s General Knowledge Quiz podcast. You\'ll pick up Brain of Britain later this year. (Their Counterpoint music quiz is also remarkably alluring, even though I get 2 answers right per episode....)
\'Brian
Hola works pretty great if you also are using AdBlock.
Hola works pretty great if you also are using AdBlock.
they apparently got rid of some undesirable types and those with low ratios, and membership was by invite only.
I'm still trying to find an Australian TV Torrent site. Anybody know of one?Check your PM box (if it works)
I'm still trying to find an Australian TV Torrent site. Anybody know of one?Check your PM box (if it works)
After thebox.bz closed the first time, I found tvchaos.uk and they are really good at capping most of the UK game shows daily and weekly. I believe right now, it is invite only but if you can get in it's worth it! I'm still trying to find an Australian TV Torrent site. Anybody know of one?tasmanit.es is the old Diwana. The only current show capped there is Family Feud.