I purchased an VGX-XL100 from PC World on Monday, mainly on impulse after reading the favourable PC Pro review.

On getting home, I pulled everything out of the box, and tried to find the manual. This is the first failing, there is no printed user manual included. There are about half a dozen other booklets for marketing, WIFI and the like, but only a very brief ‘getting started’ sheet. If this is intended to be a ‘consumer’ rather than ‘geek’ product, then having no printed manual is unforgivable. The user manual is available online, or from a link on the desktop. However, it’s 206 pages, and not everyone who buys this product will have a printer at home.

Anyway, being a ‘geek’, I quickly hooked it up to my TV (A Panasonic 37” Viera). I connected it to my amp via the optical digital cable, and plugged in my TV aerial.

Next problem. There is no aerial output to connect to a TV. Thus, the VGX-XL100 must be the last device on the chain. Obviously, my TV is currently the last device, and so there is no way of connecting without adding a separate aerial, or using a splitter. For the time being, I left the VGX-XL100 unconnected.

I booted the system, and set about going through the Windows MCE setup. This took about half an hour, and I then had a fantastic display of the Windows desktop. I then did my usual first step, and ran Windows Update to get all the latest patches for XP and MCE. Another half an hour and I had an up to date system. Isn’t life great!

Err, no actually, life is not great. This is where I started hitting real problems.

The first major problem is my fallback if I decide to get a refund (currently looking 70-30 in favour of refund). The system will not play protected DVD’s via Component or HDMI. I tried various software DVD players, and each of them gave an error about copy protection. Cyberlink’s PowerDVD gave the best error message, and I was able to determine what was happening. It turns out that the Nvidia drivers for the GE6600 do not allow copy protected (Macrovision) DVD’s to be played via the TV-OUT function of the card. This is supposed to stop people copying disks, but rather defeats the object of a media centre PC.

After some searching, I found DVD Region Free that disables the copy protection and region checks, but this costs $40, and is a kludge.

Next problem, the audio system included does not allow direct passthrough of the DD5.1/DTS soundtrack to the SP/DIF port on the sound card. After doing some research, this problem has also affected people using the older US version (X1). What appears to happen is that the DD5.1 signal is converted to analog, and this analog signal is then converted to Dolby Digital Live! format before being output to the SP/DIF port. Thus, you lose a lot of sound quality. Very bad.

A workaround for the DD5.1/DTS problem is to purchase another sound card (either PCI or USB), and force everything through that. But again, this should not be necessary.

The third major problem is more Microsoft than Sony. The January 24th 2006 MCE2005 Rollup patch seems to break MCE. This manifests itself in a number of ways, but always ends up crashing MCE.

So far I’ve done 2 full re-installs, and haven’t yet got a system I can live with. I’ve not even tried to get MCE working correctly – I’ve been using WMP10 and WinDVD. Admittedly, these look great, but it still feels too much like a PC rather than a Media Centre.

The other great feature is the keyboard. This is a radio controlled device rather than a infra-red, so works at any angle.

However, while I’ve been writing this, I’ve realised that £999 is a lot of money for something that doesn’t work without lots of hand holding, so I’m now 100% sure it’s going back for a refund.

Cheers,
Rick

Welcome to DS and thanks for the review... the hype around this product at CES Vegas was seriously tempting me, however the fact it was a single tuner PVR put me off somewhat... but with what you are reporting, whats the point? I was hoping it might eventually replace some clutter, however its likely to cause more clutter - oh well By the way, does it operate silently as promised? And, importantly, what was the picture like???

What a shame, I hope Sony's standalone PVR in May does not become a white elephant too

Again, thanks for the review. I had no idea this model was out yet - least of all in PC World!

That is crazy! I have had a similar problem with a notebook computer with nVidia graphics chipset and a TV-out. I found a different (older) version of the driver and that fixed it. However, I thought that Viiv compliance was supposed to stop all these kind of problems! Having said that, I think the XL100 is the first machine I've seen with HDMI anyway.

I am still very tempted to buy this machine, but someone needs to knock the bugs out first.

Hi,

The picture quality is great, and it does run almost silently. If you put your ear to it, you can hear a hum, but it's not noticable when watching TV. The only time you can really hear it is when it first reads a DVD, but it soon settles down.

I'm tempted to give it another go... and not install the January patch. Then just hope Microsoft and Sony get their acts together and sort out the remaining problems.

I suppose I've got a couple of weeks to keep it before I need to return it PC World for a refund. So I think I'll have another go I'll report any further findings.

Cheers,
Rick

Superb review Rick.

Interesting product but think I would send it back and consider purchasing it later after the bugs are ironed out. Chances are it may come down in price as well. IMHO it appears to be priced too high.

(BTW I use a splitter on my set up for the aerial as my original DVR a Liteon gave a terible picture using loop through. Sony is ok but just haven't got round to changing it back.)

PC

Actually sub £1000 is good for a Media PC.

What is worrying is that it has vanished from the listings of the few stores that had it. Sony Style is still showing 'pre-order' and PC World online are only showing it bundled with a Samsung HDTV for £2000!

I suppose I have got lulled into all these sub £500 PC's that paying twice as much seems a lot for not much more......

PC

Re the picture quality.

When you first pluged the system into your TV etc, did you have to change the disply settings to get a better picture?

Only reason I ask is I went into my local sony store and they had one on a 50" plasma, but have to say it looked awful, it looked like on a PC, if you dont install the drivers, you just get a basic poor image.

When I asked the lad in the shop, he didnt have a clue, he just said, all we do is take it out the box, plug it in and thats it.

Im sure the display must be better, i doubt for one moment the picture is that bad. I was just wondering if you have to change settings etc to get a better picture?

Cheers

I'm not sure what some people mean by 'copy protected' DVDs. The only feature on new DVDs is RCE, which is only a problem with some older multi-region players.

Whether of not the XL100 has a problem playing DVDs, it is worth pointing out that even though it has an HDMI output, the nVidia graphics card inside is unlikely to be HDCP compliant. Unless Sony have commissioned a special chipset, no graphics cards currently have this feature. This may lead to possible problems playing protected HD content in the future.

The DVD player does play back Region 2 and multi-region (region 0) DVDs however it is not multi-region. In fact it has a slide in DVD mechanism (Matshita UJ-846S) which has no firmware patch and no software solution to make it multi-region.

It does come with a HDMI cable.

Has anyone else experienced problems with the XL100?

I found stuttering on the built-in Avermedia tuner card and replaced it with two black-gold cards but doing so 'broke' my dvd playback. I could not play any DVD's at all. Also atte,pted to replace the graphics card to obtain a VGA/DVI output and this 'broke' the whole system and after power down it refused to boot full stop.

The graphics card is very much a sony piece of kit albeit with a Geforce 6600 chipset and it would seem that everything is component dependent in the system and tied in with controlling the HDMI output.

My main issue (having gone back to all original components in place) is that having gone into 'away' mode when the unit is left for 24 hours and you then return to it the screen comes up and is entirely green - no display at all, I think there is some problem with the way viiv powers the graphics down in away mode and then it is falling over when it powers back up?

Anybody else had these annoying issues?

I can strip my XL100 blindfold now and am on the verge of calling it quits and sticking it on eBay instead Grrrrr!

The XL100 has disappeared from the SonyStyle website. The rumours are starting that Sony have pulled it as consumers were having so many technical problems.

Interesting reading. I have one and I think its great. I've had no real issues with it.

I use HDMI to my Sony Bravia 40 inch (via a QED switching box as the Sony only has one HDMI input) and then composite audio out to my Bose 321.

I've found that using any of the hibernation/sleep functions cause problems so I've left all of those off. Probably not the most eco-friendly solution but otherwise the HDMI handshake with the set sometimes fails. And getting it to wakeup by pressing the remote/keyboard is hard work.

Picture quality I think is v. good as is IMHO the sound.

So I'm a fan. Is it worth a grand? Probably not unless you're a keen early adopter or (as in my case) want something which can download HD content and show it on my TV. I also found it useful for being able to watch downloaded (both SD and HD) material.

But I'm definitely keeping mine...