In a bizarre turn of events Virgin Media has joined forces with the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) to harass customers that the BPI claims have illegally downloaded music tracks using Virgin’s Broadband service.

Up to 800 warning letters have been sent out to customers by Virgin with the warning “if you don’t read this your broadband could be disconnected”. The letter is part of a wider ‘three strikes and your out’ campaign by the BPI and has left some Virgin customers scratching their heads wondering whether they are paying Virgin Media for an internet service or a ‘re-education’ programme.

The move has been widely criticised, with some talking about ‘a PR disaster’ and ‘biting the hand that feeds it’. Whilst other ISP’s, including the Carphone Warehouse, have sent the BPI away with a flea in it’s ear, Virgin appears to have readily ‘offered-up’ it’s customers, sparking more privacy fears and concerns over loyalty.

This latest debacle comes as yet another blow to Virgin Media’s reputation following the Phorm fiasco, in which it was revealed that Virgin planned to sell its customers browsing history to the advertising company Phorm, Inc.

Whatever Virgin Media’s intentions, this appears to be advertising gold for the UK’s other ISP’s.

A user on the digitalspy forums has successful upgraded the hard disk in his V+ box. The Poster known as jamjam has extended the recording time from 80 hours to an astonishing 400 hours.

The stock 160gb hard drive was replaced with a new Seagate 750GB Ultra IDE Drive (Model No. ST3750640A). From the forum discussion it appears that the upgrade was relatively straightforward, and simply involved physical removal the old drive and replacement with the new drive. Jamjam reported that on first boot the V+ box automatically reformatted the new drive without any user input – which has been working perfectly since. The only minor niggle is that the V+ menu only displays 80 hours of available space after upgrade, although this number only decreases to 79 hours after 5 hours have been recorded. It would seem that V+ calculates the number of free hours based on the percentage of free disk space.

Check out the details here.

Please note that V+ users do not own their V+ boxes. V+ boxes remain property of Virgin Media, therefore this is one of those ‘do not try this at home’ upgrades.

I had my old Telewest TV Drive (now called V+ box) replaced recently. Unfortunately the HDMI port had become faulty and this was causing interference / picture cut outs. I understand that there is a known fault with the HDMI port on TV Drives which can cause the solder joint to fail. The new box is painted matt black (instead of silver) and seems fine.