Can somebody tell me if you have to own your own ITV dital box to use the smartcards or can you get the rented box? Is there a risk of using a rented one?

Also I have noticed a few posts about PPV stuff on SKY. Is it true that if you disconnect from the phone socket you get up to £50 worth of films or sports before it asks you to connect to the phone.

Thanx

If you do not have a box at the moment - the only current option is to rent one (you can not buy them legally)

There is no problems with using a rented one. Pick it up, get the basic package and then swap the card.

The sky trick is not much good. You get 50 quid of ppv, but next time you plug in your box to update anything they will bill you the next day.

Can somebody give me any idea how hard/easy it is to program smart cards for use with ITV digital. Maybe post a link to an instruction page or something?

Thank-you

You can buy boxes legally. The original Ondigital contracts included the box unlike the current ITV Digital contracts where the box is rented for the period of the subscription. If you decide to buy from auction sites like eBay, Yahoo etc. then you can get the serial number from the seller and check with ITV whether is is a rental box or not.

If you intend buying an Elvis then best place to look at is the Elvis (actual name MultiProgrammer) manufacturers, Ad-Teknik, home page: http://adteknik.se/english/manual.html