TEST REPORT

HDTV Linux Receiver

Inpax X-9100 Linux PVR

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 impossible not to like this little box very fast boot time thanks to a smaller Linux version runs very stable - we were not able to crash it includes large on-screen satellite meter sophisticated blindscan

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TEST REPORT

HDTV Linux Receiver

Turkish Delight

A high-definition Linux-based PVR promising a number of interesting features, all housed in a tiny case. Can it be possible?
display displays the current channel number, or the clock in standby. A flap on the right-hand side conceals a USB port and a single smart card slot which seems to be able to read a variety of cards it even accepted my Sky Digital card and allowed me to view all my subscription channels except those that are tied to an individual receiver. This was quite a surprise. The card slot is the only conditional access option: there is nowhere to add a CAM. At the back, the antenna input and loop-through serve the single tuner. Video options are limited to HDMI, Scart or composite video, whilst there are stereo audio outputs plus S/PDIF. For connection to the outside world theres an Ethernet LAN port and an RS232 port. A cold start of the receiver doesnt take as long as might be expected from a Linux-based receiver, taking around 45 seconds from

Hailing from Istanbul, Turkey, the X-9100 PVR from INPAX is quite a surprise. The little black box measures just 26cm across, 19cm deep and 4cm high and comes in a stylish shiny black case with a minimalist appearance. There are just three buttons on the front panel: Standby, channel up and channel down. An LED

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flicking the switch for a picture to appear on screen. This is one of the surprises that come from the X-9100 utilising a much smaller, embedded version of Linux than the more complex versions weve seen in the past. Those who might be daunted at the prospect of setting up a Linux receiver need not worry too much. The options and menu system are no more complicated than those of a standard receiver. USALS is supported to enable easy setup of a DiSEqC motor, with the added bonus of some major cities already being programmed into the receivers memory. A wide range of LNB settings are included, and as the receiver is of Turkish origin, special settings for DIGITURK are even included. If none of them suit your system the LNBs frequencies can also be specified manually. DiSEqC is supported from version 1.0 to 1.3 to ensure that just about any motor or switching setup will be supported. 71 satellites from around

the planet are pre-programmed into the receiver and these can be edited and deleted as required. New satellites can be added as required by simply specifying the orbital position. If you are setting your own dish up, youll be pleased to see the inclusion of a large on-screen signal meter function to help you find a good signal. Scanning satellites is fast compared to some other Linux-based receivers. For viewers of Canal Digitaal, TV Vlaanderen or UPC Direct on ASTRA 1, a special fast scan function is available. For the rest of us, a standard scan zips across the satellite spectrum in good time. A scan across Astra 2 took four minutes to scan the 90 stored frequencies. A very welcome addition is a blind scan option, so that any frequencies not already held in the transponder list can be found. This works a little differently than others weve seen in the past. First, the entire frequency spectrum is scanned, adding any newly-found frequencies to the stored transponder list. After this, the regular scan kicks in, scanning the new frequencies alongside those previously stored. This adds some time to the scanning process, 2,5 minutes were taken to find and add an extra eight transponders to the list, then another 4:15 to scan them all. The blind scan isnt ideal for feedhunting however, as there is no ability to scan a portion of the frequency band. Channels are accessed from a channel list similar to those on most other receivers. The left and right buttons are used to filter the list between FTA-only, HD and encrypted channels, plus of course there is the option to

display everything. The red button can be used to filter the list further by limiting the satellites shown in the list. An A-Z function is also available, which filters the list by the first letter of the channel name, but doesnt sort it further than this so Azerbaijan TV would still appear ahead of Aastha TV if this was their order in the default list this I found just a little confusing. Dedicated page up and down buttons on the remote help to speed navigation of this and other lists around the menus. The remote itself is a standard, generic feeling model, not helped by the occasional occurrence of the pressed button repeating your previous action rather than the one you were expecting. Another rather strange quirk is that the order of the coloured function buttons is different from the normal red-green-yellowblue sequence. I didnt even know that this order has been burned into my brain from the use and testing of so many receivers over the years, but I proved that it is by pressing blue when I thought I was pressing green several times. The remote is kept simple, and there are no buttons for selecting the correct aspect ratio, or screen resolution, but these options can be found inside the receivers settings menus. Most important options are found here, including to select between RGB or CVBS from the Scart port. To access the latter option select HDMI mode 5761 and push volume buttons up or down

to toggle between RGB and CVBS. There is one special feature in the menus where Inpax must however be congratulated. An option exists to store the sound volume setting for each channel individually. This is the perfect answer to that all-too-common situation of changing channel from an overly quiet one to one of those that has the sound cranked up so loud that your neighbours will be banging on the wall within no time. Of course, if only audio levels could be regulated to avoid this situation, such a function wouldnt be needed. But that is unlikely to happen anytime soon and very likely never, so in the meantime: thank you Inpax for thinking of this. The channel editing functions are limited to deletion, moving, and renaming. The sometimes important ability to edit PIDs is missing, for example. There are eight preset favourites lists. Their names are quite strange, with the first few letters missing. But its easy to correct this by simply adding a new favorite and giving it whatever name you want. The yellow button in the FAV menue will create a new favorite list. There is no room inside the tiny case for a hard drive, recordings have to be made onto a USB device plugged into the front socket. Recordings can be started directly from the remotes record button or from a timer event that can be set manually or from the EPG. The 9100s EPG is quite usable, and

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Inpax X-9100 Linux PVR A competent good-looking black box with full range of functions

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can be switched between a one and seven-day version. Its a bit strange though in that the grid display only fills a quarter of the screen, so its not the easiest to quickly see what is scheduled more than an hour or two into the future. The event timer is also of a standard type, with some repeating options including Monday to Friday and weekends only. The receiver can be set to either record or just switch to the selected
1. Blind scan 2. Channel list 3. EPG 4. Favourites editing 5. File browser 6. FTP client 7. Multi picture-in-picture 8. Recorded programme playback

channel at the desired time, and theres also a choice to switch off after the recording has finished. While a recording is in progress, the channel list is restricted only to channels on the transponder being received so theres no chance of lost recordings or receiver meltdown. Its worth noting at this point that the manual warns that while the theoretical hard drive size limit is four partitions totalling 2 terabytes (which I think even I may have trouble filling up), it is not recommended to use partitions greater than 120 gigabytes. Recording and playback works very well, with no

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problems noted even when recording HD channels to a USB stick. My experience with Linux receivers has been mixed in the past. I remember too well some important timer recordings that never even started because the receiver had crashed hours earlier, still displaying its equivalent of the Windows hourglass and a frozen picture of the lastreceived channel. Despite my best efforts to confuse and confound the little box, I wasnt able to crash it at all, even when recording. As recordings are stored on a USB device, its easy to access them on a PC. Another well done goes to Inpax here the settings menu gives a choice of recording format between .MPG and .TS files, a welcome extra choice that could be very useful to those who wish to edit or archive their recordings onto DVD or convert them into other formats. Despite the ease of connection to the outside world via Ethernet, it isnt possible to access recordings by FTP, so disconnecting the USB device and walking it to a computer is the only way to access them. There is an FTP client available, but this works in one direction only to copy media to the USB for playback. It is also possible to connect to an SMB (Samba) share in the same one-way manner. The variety of file formats that can be replayed is impressive, and most of the sample files I tried played without any trouble. The list includes AVI, MPG, VOB, FLV, MP4, MKB, 3GP and ASF which covers most bases. Its nice to see that channel lists saved in the SatcoDX .SDX format may also be imported from the file menu.

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9. The embedded Linuxs web interface 10. Satellite scan 11. Signal meter 12. Telnet into the receiver

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Also included is an internet radio player. When it works, it is really quite good and kept a connection from my location in England to an Australian channel overnight without any problems. I did get several server busy messages, but when I did 12 get through I received some good quality audio, with some stations accompanied by artist names and song titles. Scrolling through the huge station lists is a real pain though as each page of the list is retrieved from the internet when requested. After a long time in the alphabetical list I gave up while still on the letter A, but at least theres a favourites list here too. This will be invaluable when I want to return to the esoteric mix of stations I have already found, from 247 Polka Heaven (The Worlds Polka Network) to Amateur Repeater W6NUT. I wonder if even the radio hams in California would imagine they

were being overheard on a satellite receiver across the world via the internet? And will I ever get to the end of the list, to find out if New Yorks Z100 is available? Dragging myself away from the hypnotic rhythm of the polka to the next menu entry brings us a Youtube

player. This also works very well, and where the video quality is good enough, is perfectly watchable on a TV. A number of presets give access to the most popular videos of the moment plus comedy, music, news, sports and so on. A search is also available which opens up the entire weird and wild

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world of Youtube onto your TV. It is a nice addition to have and the video plays back a lot smoother than it does on my ageing overloaded PC. The final menu entry in the set of internet applications is not mentioned in the manual: Extra Movies. Im sure most of us would say yes please to some extra movies, but this menu is password protected; here we explain to all of you how to access it: Enter IP settings in setup menue, press green button which closes DHCP and instead asks for DNS1. Enter 208.67.222.222 and save by pushing red button. Then DNS2 pops up, enter same IP 208.67.222.222 again and save with red button. Now the receiver needs to be restarted by switching power off and on. Go again to Extra Movies and now type in 9-8-7-6 for password. Voila, it works. Its possible to use telnet to get into the receiver, and this reveals a command prompt from the BusyBox system, as utilised by the Amazon Kindle and many other devices. BusyBox gives access to some basic Linux commands, which on their own are probably of little or no use to the everyday user but we can at least be nosy and see what is contained on the internal memory. Similarly, connecting with a web browser gives an interface to the embedded Linux operating system with plenty of debugging information.

Theres not really anything of use there either, but Linux fans could find the information interesting. Whether or not it may be possible to add to the software inside the machine to enable more functionality is not clear and there are no clues from the receiver or its manual. The X-9100 is a different Linux-based receiver than most weve seen in the past. For some, this could be a disappointment as it feels more like a conventional receiver in use than those running larger Linux distributions such as Enigma2. This however makes it more

appealing to those who want to watch TV with less hassle or the threat of things not working as smoothly as they could. Connecting to the internet is as easy as plugging in an Ethernet cable if you have DHCP available on your router, and the bonus additions of the Youtube and internet radio players are genuinely useful. If the internet radio interface could be made a little better it would on its own be a perfect, easy way to access thousands of stations in good quality. What is most pleasing though is the receivers re-

liability. My fear of losing recordings from previous Linux receiver experiences is almost gone. Whilst testing the receiver for this review it has not let me down at all, and that is what most people want and need: a receiver that does all it says it will, and doesnt crash at the most important moments. There are a few small quirks and criticisms as I have mentioned already, most of which may be addressed in future software updates. Its impossible not to like this little black box and be impressed by the full range of functions it contains. Overall

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Audio settings can be stored for each channel individuall.y Accepts very large harddrives via USB. Software runs extremely stable. PVR allows storing in .TS format. Impressive list of file formats for playback.

Expert Opinion
Distributor Tel.
Andy Middleton TELE-satellite Test Center UK

TECHNICAL
DATA
NPA ELEKTRONK SAN. VE TC.LTD.T. Kemeralt Str. efkat Business No: 1-3 Floor:4 Karaky, Istanbul, Turkey +90 212 293 63 12 | +90 212 293 63 13 +90 212 293 63 18 http://www.inpax.com info@inpax.com.tr / inpax@inpax.com.tr X-9100 Linux HD PVR HDTV Satellite Receiver with PVR Yes Yes 1.0/1.1/1.2/1.3 1 QPSK 2000 to 45000 QPSK 2000 to 45000 8PSK 2000 to 45000 MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, H.264, MP@ML 2 (left & right) Composite, HDMI 480p, 480i, 576p, 576i. 720p, 1080i at 50Hz, 720p &1080i at 60Hz, 1080p at 30Hz No No S/PDIF Yes Yes 100-240V AC, 50/60Hz 2 None 1 universal

Fax Website Email Model Function SCPC compatible USALS DiSEqC Scart connectors Symbol rates

Alphabetical channel listing only sorts by first letter. Color coding of remote not to standard.

this is a competent, goodlooking little machine that does its job very well. Now, you must excuse me it is time to wrap up this report so that I can watch some more funny ani-

mals on Youtube, listen to some more polka, and, oh! I almost forgot that I could even find some time away from these distractions to watch some good old-fashioned HD TV on my new little friend too!

MPEG modes Audio outputs Video outputs Resolutions UHF output 0/12 volt output Digital audio output EPG C/Ku-band compatible Power supply Common interface Card slots

ENERGY
DIAGRAM

Apparent Power

Active Power Mode Active StandBy Apparent Active Factor 19 W 10 W 0.52 14 W 7 W 0.5

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