Dreambox Image Install With Flashwizard Pro

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 cableCross-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!

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. 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. Your running factory firmware I presume? There are other images avalible as well, I use pli, it has a really slick looking interface and the osd is cusomizable.

It will let you align the top left and bottom right of the osd so you dont get that cropping anymore.Ive added this disclaimer before but I will add it again so that no one is confused, with most ird's when someone sais 3rd partry firmware they are refering to hacking, dreambox is different, dreambox has released the source code for their box's and can be downloaded by anyone freely, they even have a cvs server setup. So people download the code and have tweaked it and modified it to their likling, these are the 3rd party images. Well I wouldnt recommend it as a primary box thats for sure, I use mine in conjunction with my fortec mercury II. The fortec controls the motor and finds the feeds, I then enter them into the dreambox.the mercury II sits in my computer room and the dreambox in the living room, the dreambox is an amazing ird, but its defn not an ird I would recommend to anyone as their primary ird. Its defn not as plug and play as other irds as well, as mentioned the menu structure is quite different then other irds and takes some time getting used to, it also requires more tinkering to get up and running, often with apps from the computer. True, it is mostly just a small PC (VERY SMALL) with a tuner built-in. I was actually hoping for 'more', in the form of a slick interface and all the bells and whistles already included/configured (rather than having to piecemeal them together on the pc).

It does appear that there are packages out there that have a lot of what I want from the Dreambox, but it's definitely not as slick and easy as I'd hoped it would be 'right out of the box'.One nice feature of the Dreambox (or other linux variant fta boxes) is that the hardware is fixed (known), so development of modules that really do just install and work without any further tinkering is much easier. Heck, I have a PCI card, but I never use it because I have troubles with drivers and various software not working as they should.

On the same page you’ll need to fill in the Connection Parameters at the top of the page5. If you have not changed you password Login= root password = dreambox.6. To obtain your dreambox IP do the following on your dreambox remote.Menu-Setup-Expert Setup-Communication Setup.You’ll see your IP at the top of the page make a note of this and enter this IP into Flashwizard.Also untick the DHCP box so your Dreambox IP will never change and remain static.7. Now click the install a firmware tab top left8. Now click on the yellow folder, this will open a browser windowNow navigate to the Dreambox image you would like to install.10.

At the prompt select YES.11. You’ll now see the image been transfered12. And then image transfer completed.13. Exit Flashwizard and pull the power from you dreambox and wait for 30 seconds before reapplying power.14. Time to get sat in front of the TV! As your box boots you’ll see the Boot Logo Screen come up maybe a couple of times.15.

At the Pal Screen Select Pal or the system your TV uses and then press the green button on your remote to save.16. Select your language and press the ok button.17. Select your time zone and press the green button to save.18. You’ll now see the Diseqc Setup menu and have 3 options to choose fromNo Diseqc for a single LNB Setup.Simple For a the setup of 2 Lnb’sComplex for Diseqc 1.2 or Usuals/Goto X19. If you want to use usuals keeps the goto x box ticked and enter your Longitude and latitude and press the green button to save.20.

Now select Auto Transponder Scan. This will scan all available transponders till a valid one is found. When found press green to scan. When the scan is complete press ok.At this point you can now scan another satellite with a press of the green button or red not to.

Dreambox Image Install With Flashwizard Product

Later on in this tutorial ill be explaining how to transfer channel setting so you don’t really need to.21. Click exit and select a channel free to air to view.Now press the menu button-option5-reboot now, this will save your settings.