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First Impressions:
Wow, this is one tiny unit! I normally ignore the manufacturer's instructions and stack units ontop of eachother. I definitely won't be stacking anything on top of this box, as it would be crushed.

The STB appears very sturdy given its size.

No power switch on back. I guess that means unplugging the unit is the only way to completely power down for swapping cables/switches/etc. crud,

The manual is HUGE, but 90% of it is in another language. Skimming the manual gives me the impression that this is going to be a bear to configure (not what I was looking for! Crud.)

Power supply is external – similar to laptop. 1st Problem, the cord is some funky European plug-in cord that will not work with typical American 110v outlets. Luckily the cord is the same style as many electronics (thus, I've stolen one from my box of xBox supplies since the seller claims he "always" ships an adaptor [somehow mine must have imploded in transit or something])

I already knew that I'd be dealing with either a SCART adaptor or using the Video/Left/Right RCA jacks on the back for video, so this is no surprise. There are places that you can buy the scart to svideo and scart to component video adaptors, but I opted to pass on those for now.

The remote is tiny. Holding the remote in my hand feels okay, until I attempt to press any of the buttons towards the bottom – it's difficult to press the buttons as the bottom without losing hold of the remote. But hey, at least it came with batteries!

Extras included:
4 port Diseqc switch (like I need another of these!)
Standard serial cable
Cross-over serial adaptor

Setup/Use:
Using the Yellow/Red/While RCA cables to connect to my TV (I didn't opt for the scart-svideo adaptor), connecting to TV was simple.

Booting the box brings me to a flickering screen. Oh yeah, this must be PAL and not NTSC. I can see the some text flickering in the background but cannot read it. I start messing with buttons and see the text change, and can almost make out the letters PAL in the black flikers. A few more clicks and the flickering quit and I see that I've conveniently selected NTSC.

Time to scan in a satellite… great, only Eurpoean sats are loaded. Trolling through the guides and various sites gave no help in manually configuring new sats. Everything pointed towards "adding" sats that were already listed in the list, and I needed to add sats that were not in the list on the box. Finally I found a satellite.xml that someone had configured for North America, and figured out that I could use a program called DreamEdit to upload the xml file onto the box via Ethernet or serial port.

After loading satellite.xml with the correct sats, I could still not select a satellite to scan. After loads of tinkering, it became obvious that I needed to enter a menu to configure the satellite/lnb options. Then I needed to enter another menu to locate the sat, and then a submenu to scan the transponders.

I selected the gotoxx functionally from the menu, and to no surprise of mine at this point, it did nothing for me. I entered my lon/lat info in various ways, but it never even caused the motor to turn at all (reading various forums confirmed the suck gotoxx support). So, now comes the fun – I had to manually find and store each satellite position and using the stored locations via diseq 1.2.

Storing satellite positions shouldn't be tough, but a curious problem with the menu requires that you always add and immediately edit the info for that location and save it. You'll never get back to that entry to edit it later since the dialog only allows you to tab into the edit fields when you are on the first or last entry in the list of satellite locations. Very frustrating when you realize that you've made a mistake and need to go back and fix it. The whole "adding a sat & transponders" thing and getting them scanned in really sucks. So much that that I already dislike this thing. As for scanning results – it picked up a few channels that even my fortec blindscan didn't find, but it also missed a bunch of channels (luckily it looks like there is a nice and cumbersome method to manually enter these channels.. crud)

Okay, so I've scanned in a few sats, so lets go watch tv:
Clicking the menu, I can select TV or Radio (among other things). Instinctively clicking the big middle button brings up the list of available tv options to choose from. It's pretty intuitive, but a bit overwhelming to have all the info that I'd scanned in to now be formatted by sat/provider/service (interesting that it knows the "provider"! That's a tidbit of info that may be helpful to some).

Selecting channels is easy enough. Each channel is given a unique number, so you can actually key in the number and it will go there (a feature that I miss on my fortec, and a feature that will make using this device with a pvr work pretty well). Changing between channels (same sat or not) is as quick as you'd expect, but there's a little distorted/flicker for a split second as soon as the channel tunes in.

One thing I'm noticing is that the bottom of my screen is getting cutoff. This isn't such a big deal, except that the menu/info for the channel is located at the bottom of the screen. Wait, I hope that's not the EPG area, because the epg is the only reason I wanted this box… crud! I did some reading, I guess this is a known issue that nobody really cares to fix since this doesn't occur in PAL format… double crud! I emailed Tech Support, but as of 5 days later, no reply.

Tinkering around in the menus, nothing much too exciting there. There are some "skins" for the interface, so I decide to select a new skin. Yikes, flipping screen like PAL comes up again.. except that I can see nothing at all (completely blank flipping screen) and cannot get the remote to respond. Eventually I have had enough rebooting and staring at it, so I use the DreamUp utility from their website, download their latest firmware flash for this box, and connect it to my pc using the included serial cable – reflashing is a breeze and got me outta the flicker-loop! Oh crud.. no more channels/satellite positions/etc. I guess I should have saved them off to my PC before tinkering :/

One thing that I'm seeing that is worth nothing about this device is that it really never shuts off. I mentioned that before (no power switch on back), but didn't realize how true this is. If you get an error message on the screen and then click the power button, the unit will tell you that it is off (indicated by the green light on the front turning to red), yet the error message continues to display. Even when you don't have an error, the unit outputs a black screen image instead of cutting off its output entirely. This is a problem for people like me who have an A/V switch that auto-senses active inputs. The dreambox video is always active, even when it's turned off. So now I have to manually switch my A/V switch over to watch tv on another input.. crud. Oh yeah, and everytime you turn the unit back on, it requires you to select a channel - it turns on and shows just a black screen until you start clicking menu buttons and select a channel. This seems silly, especially if you watch the same channel most of the time. Crud.


I plan to give the unit a bit more workout when I have time, but no more time for now. The big projects for the future will be setting up the ability to record scheduled events to a shared pc drive, and load the EPG database with my own EPG data. A secondary 'fun' project would be to determine how to capture/rip mp3's for listening on my zune,ipod, or rio.. and maybe investigate the streaming functionality to stream video directly to my xboxes with xbmc installed.