Coolsat 7000 questions

[Jim S.]

Does anyone have the last factory firmware for the Coolsat 7000, or know where I could get it?

Mine came from ebay with the last hacker version. It works most of the time, but I've found a few oddities.

First, some sort of feed makes it lock up. I know it's not MPEG4, but I don't know whether it's 4:2:2 SD or MPEG2 HD. I see that 4:2:2 was a problem with the similar Visionsat IV-200, but got fixed.

Second, sometimes it takes a long time to pick up the sound from a channel. Sometimes it also gets into a mood where it won't give any sound from any channels until I hit the physical power switch.

Third, I'm not sure if the blind scan is accurate, but this could be an alignment issue rather than a firmware issue. I notice it most on AMC6, where it will only find the NBC mux about half the time, even though the signal and quality are good and it comes right up if I go to it manually. The reason I think it might be an alignment issue is because I'm currently using a Dish 300 for AMC6, because my 30" dish with multiple LNBs is too far west to get to it. The signal is good for NBC and some feeds, marginal for the gospel channel but I'll never watch that. But I wonder if the loose focus of the small dish is picking up adjacent birds, maybe even the Dish birds since they're so strong, and overloading the receiver. (So far I haven't had any signals pop up that I can say for sure belong to a different bird though. This is in contrast to my 30", where tonight I'm getting RTPI, presumably from AMC2, on my LNB pointed to AMC1! Funny that it wasn't there earlier though. I'll have to watch this and see if anything else pops up. My setup for the 30" is the center LNB on Galaxy 19, and equidistant LNBs on the sides for Galaxy 17 and AMC1.)

 

[knowmiddlename]

I’ve got the latest factory firmware if you want to PM me, however updating will not likely resolve the issues you are experiencing. The CS7000 microPVR is somewhat of a quirky box. It can be very frustrating at times, however the PVR feature is very nice and I enjoy using it to record shows and to burn DVD's. The CS7000 does not blind scan well because it hangs on data and skips by signals for unknown reasons. A CS5000 or 6000 are much better boxes for blind scanning, but these receivers have their own drawbacks too. The audio on some signals is encoded with Dolby AC3 which the CS7000 cannot decode. You'll need to take the digital output from the receiver and plug it into a CyberHome CH-SRD 600R/H or a home theater system for decoding.

 

[Jim S.]

So far I haven't had it ever hang during scanning, although sometimes it pauses for a long time.

I had hoped that the scan issue would've been fixed since it was fixed on the Visionsat and this receiver looks and acts so similar, but maybe not since I would've thought that the hackers would've started with the latest firmware also. The last update to the hacker software was in May, and they're calling it version 2.22.

The audio issue I spoke of though, is not AC3. It's normal channels that it just decides for some reason not to produce sound on.