On first impressions the Mediastar HDX9100 looks to be quite a nice fully featured satellite receiver that has had some time spent on the design and development of the receiver functions, something that isn’t to common these days as receiver manufactures and reseller are driven to get the new models out selling ASAP with out some of the testing you might expect.

The first thing I noticed about the Mediastar receiver is that the channel name is displayed on the front panel of receiver a feature I haven’t seen since the Nokia 9500’s of the late 90’s  a nice touch I thought. First I decided to connect the Mediastar to my terrestrial antenna and perform a automatic scan to see what the tuner would load knowing that I live in an area that has average reception as best. To my disappointment the rec

eiver did load some channels but it didn’t load all the digital channel that I know is available in my area by way of my standard $100 set top box from Aldi.  The Mediastar’s EPG was quite impressive though the receiver allows for up to 14 days ahead in the programing and will also allow you to bring up a description of the show you have selected even if it is a few days in advance, I also noted that you can

my setup

record program by pressing the yellow button the remote in blocks instead of setting a start and finish time which I alway seem to be out by a few minutes cutting off the end my documentaries .

I connected up the Mediastar to my motorised 2.3m dish using a Super jack V box III positioner (disequ 1.2) and after searching through the detailed list of satellite available I selected the short list for my motorised dish to be able to receive. I then manually moved my dish to the most Western limit using the V box front panel controls. The Mediastar asks for a transponder from each satellite which is easily selected using the left the right buttons on the remote control, there are then three options for moving the dish, continuous, time (in seconds 1-5) and pulses (1-5), I decided to use the continuous setting which prompted the dish to move to the East, the dish then stopped on my first satellite Asiasat 2, I thought that dish had stopped by coincidence on Asiasat 2 but further investigation found that the receiver measures the transponder you have selected for each satellite and stops the dish when the receiver measures a carrier on that particular transponder (provided you pick a transponder unique to each satellite). I have never seen this feature on a satellite receiver before and this made setting up by C band system extremely easy if only every receiver I had ever owned have this feature I would have saved many frustrating hours searching the skys for satellites.

Once I have my C band setup complete I wanted to load some MPEG 4 or DVB-s2 channels to see just good the picture quality was, I decided to start with Asiasat 3 as it has Fashion TV HD and a few Indian “HD” services.  The receiver loaded the channels with ease and they looked fantastic on my LG 42″ Plasma not that were of any particular interest to me but it was interesting to see these services running.

The last thing I thought I would try was the USB port on the back to record from the terrestrial and satellite, I had a Western Digital 320G HD from Officeworks handy so I plugged it in after formatting it to FAT 32 which is the only file system the Mediastar will run with unfortunately. The receiver sensed the presence of the hard drive and asked to format the drive which I said yes to. Recording was simple you could record program blocks from the EPG or setup timers, time-shift programs or simply record continuously. To play the recording on my computer back I have to search around on the Internet to find a player as it is recorded all programs in MPEG 4 compression I downloaded something called a GOM player and downloaded the necessary files, all of which was straight forward. The quality of the programming being played back was amazing I couldn’t believe the resolution very impressive but it did chew thought space on the drive every 30minutes of recording was around 1Gig of spare on the drive you wouldn’t want to record for a few days with out a massive drive.

I would conclude the Mediastar receiver to be quite good receiver with a few very interesting features I hadn’t seen in a while and a few new completely new ones. The terrestrial tuner could be improved on and the unit runs quite hot but I guess with so much packed into the receiver that is to be expected. The MPEG 4 and DVB-S2 channels looked great and I’m sure this is the way of the future for satellite transmission, EPG and recording work easily and didn’t require 5 university degrees in computer technology to operate. The price is quite expensive when you compare it to other standard DVB receivers on the market  but you can notice the little extras the receiver offers the user and when they say the receiver has a feature it does and is easily operated by a typical user.

Below I have put the receiver spec’s that I found on the web,

Video Output Formats: HDMI, YPbPr, S-Video, Composite Video, and SPDIF Optical.

External connections include: UBS 2.0, Ethernet IP, HTTP and FTP which can be set.

Other notable features are: 14 day EPG linked to PVR timer settings, Blind Scan, and Ethernet networking, and video mosaic function.

Recording Features: The unit can record  2 channels simultaneously, and viewing is possible from the HDD or “off air” at the same time.

Size: The receiver has a small footprint 330 x 200mm

Card Types Compatable : It is equipped with 2 smartcard slots for NDS and Irdeto as well as 2 common interface sockets for CI modules.

I bought my receiver from Av-Comm  located in Sydney via phone they were quite helpful and shipped the receiver Express Post arriving at my home two days later, I would highly recomend them to anyone wishing to buy this receiver as they seemed to have a general understanding of the receiver and were just a sales agents.