Something that has always bugged me about my Sky+ Box is the lack of any decent outputs on it.

The Sky+ box is an awesome piece of kit. The ability to be able to pause and rewind live television is amazingly useful, as is the ability to be able to record an entire television series without having to remember to do it each week. To be completely honest, I really couldn’t do without the box now and despite other boxes being available that perform a similar function now, the Sky+ box was one of the first.

Although my box being less than 18 months old though I am always annoyed that is lacks any serious outputs. What is penned as a next generation digital recording device should really offer a little more flexibility. Here is the reason – if I want to watch a football match or a film on my projector I can get glorious Dolby Digital surround sound by connecting an optical cable from the box to my home cinema amplifier – great so far. However, to watch video I have to attach a composite video cable from the rear of the box to the amplifier video input, which is far from ideal. The image isn’t actually that bad, but as you can imagine, it does not give a brilliant picture and is far off where it should be.

I don’t really understand why they couldn’t have put an HDMI socket on the rear, or at very least a component output. It is a minor annoyance on an otherwise brilliant machine. I guess the only thing would be to upgrade to a Sky+ HD box that does come with an HDMI output.