XCRUISER XDSR385HD on VAST

[GranDad]

Thought I would share my experience of setting up the XDSR385HD to work on VAST.

Previous to this I had purchased a VAST CAM/Smart card combination and installed it in an OpenBox S10.
I like the S10 it was relatively easy to set up and the picture was good, however the audio synchronisation was not good
on all channels. Lip sync on GEM was the worst and could not be cured no matter how hard I tried with direct audio connections
or with what Firmware loaded, I found it unwatchable.

After much reading and comparison it appeared the XDSR385HD was the best value for money to suit my requirements, I don't
need a twin tuner. Leroy Patrol had a good offer so I approached him and the deal was done. Leroy did his best under unfavourable
conditions to ship it to me (thank you Leroy). It arrived Christmas Eve.

During the previous week a friend had approached me, who like me lives in a black spot, and wanted to get VAST approval, their address
came up as no service and was approved straight away for VAST on a temporary smartcard number.
We decided on going with the SatKing box which was ordered along with dish, roof mounts and LNB.
The SatKing box arrived before anything else, so I now had a comparison tool to check the Lip sync on GEM and against the S10.

Authorisation was straight forward after a phone call and pictures were forthcoming, in all a very painless experience.
You don't have to do anything it just works. I quickly checked the Lip sync on GEM and found it to be OK.

For the average punter I was quit impressed with the Satking box, the pictures are fantastic using HDMI @ 1080i it however doesn't do progressive.
The approved VAST boxes are totally un-configurable and I could not even set up a favourite. This would not be a problem to most people as the
channel allocation numbers mirror most digital STB's and the menu list function work well, the box was good to use for a couple of nights
I personally like to have a bit more flexibility with channel editing and the ability to tune in other services.

Monday arvo the XDSR385HD arrived. It was simple enough to move the CAM to the XDSR385HD, it plugs into the back of the box.
It fired up fine. I deleted the transponders from the C1 Satellite list, then using the advanced search plus all the parameters for VAST with network (NIT) turned on commenced a search.

Bingo all the VAST channels (plus a couple of interlopers) populated the service list. I marvelled at the ease of using the Service Manager and soon had the channels not enabled by my card deleted, and those remaining edited to sensible names and reordered channel numbers to my liking.
In the device set up I went straight to 1080P as I have a very modern Sony Bravia TV capable of progressive. I sat back and was very pleased with the MPEG4 HD picture quality. The upscaled SD to progressive is brilliant as well.

This box is extremely well thought out GUI wise, just hitting the down arrow brings up a simple service (channels) list,15 in total with a brief program description next to it, one of the nicest features I have seen on any STB. The PVR function is brilliant with a nice skip function on playback customisable in two ways, you can hit the right arrow and it will try to add detect, or just his one of the number buttons and it will fast-forward that many minutes in an instant. Recording in H.264 format definitely keeps the file size smaller on the USB drive.

Having a spare digital input to my AV receiver I decided to make use of the optical output on the XDSR385HD. Selecting GEM I sat back and enjoyed perfect audio Lip Sync. This box has many more functions including comprehensive networking abilities, but as I have inbuilt Wi-Fi in the Bravia and that is doing all I require for now.
The upscaled MPEG4 1080P pictures produced by this box surpass the inbuilt DVB-T tuner of my W800A Bravia.

Running out of things to do I thought I would check the Radio side as it is nice to listen to the BBC service. To my surprise it just said Scrambled, I knew the smartcard was in and working and the radio service worked fine on the S10. The only thing I could think to do was a Firmware upgrade as I had noticed it was a couple of revisions behind. This is very easy to do as you just place the firmware file on the root of your USB stick then plug it in, in a few seconds the box finds the file and asks you to press the red button. The firmware upgrade then proceeds following with a re-boot, you don't even have to re-load your settings they are all untouched. The Radio service worked perfectly after this and I used the Services editor to rearrange the channels to my liking.

The last job was to add the XDSR385HD to my Harmony One Remote a straight forward job with the XDSR385HD being in the remotes data base. A while back I made all the channel icons for the Harmony using the Microsoft Snip tool lifting them from various places and resizing them to Logitech's specs. If anyone wants a copy of them here they are.



Cheers GranDad