Posted 4 days ago

Virgin TV 360. Any good?

I have been offered a bundle deal which includes the Virgin TV 360 box and the basic channels.

I currently have a Humax Freesat box which is ok but a bit sluggish and it's about 10 years old.

Had anyone here got this Virgin 360 box and what do they think of it?

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14th Apr
I’m not a fan personally. It works. And it will be better than your freesat box for the amount of supported apps and the speed in which they load at, plus the ability to record more channels at the same time. But compared to previous platforms they used 360 is the worst in my opinion.

Series links sometimes just randomly break. Other times it will keep recording repeats. You can’t customise recording preferences as much as you used to be able to with TiVo. UI can be laggy and/ or unstable at times. And if you’re watching certain content in SD it will butcher it in upscaling to not only make the picture look like crap but also introduce issues like motion judder which my TV is generally imnune to otherwise.

Finally for recordings Virgin Media always just go by the start and end time in the TV guide. Whereas most other platforms start and end by the embedded signal that most channels transmit to indicate this. Live events that overrun from the schedule just get cut off at the end if you try to record them.
14th Apr
What can I say - probably not the best out there, but they're competent enough and do what there suppose to do. Interface is not the smoothest or prettiest, but like any system you get used to it.
15th Apr
You may be better off waiting for Freely that's meant to launch this year. It's essentially the replacement to Freeview and Freesat and will merge broadcast TV with internet TV.

Virgin 360 will be passable but it's unlikely to progress much, most of the direction is towards the stream products.
2 m ago
In the past I got a Virgin box when my TV reception wasn't great, and the box took nearly 2 minutes to get on it's feet from turning on at the wall. (I don't keep things on Standby.) I also got the benefit of the HD channels, so I thought all was good.

Getting a new TV that had a better tuner, the quality on Freeview HD just blew the Virgin box away, as whilst the virgin box was technically HD, the bitrate of the HD channels meant lots of compression artefacts. The TV was also on it's feet in seconds.

That was a good time to dump Virgin who spend the entire time bigging themselves up rather than providing a good service. Good riddance.