I started installing a new DM800 on the 23 of December, and I have been getting the ”tuning failed” problem - and of course I have spent hours thinking there was something wrong with my setup or configuration, trying new images and so on and nothing has worked, it still appears every now and then when I change channels (a couple of times in a normal night), pretty much making the product completely useless even after having spent any number of unpaid hours trying to fix a brand new product I paid 500 Euro for.
And now I find out this is a known problem - yet DM has not informed me of this in any way with my purchase even though I got a late revision, a simple note acknowledging this with the machine could have saved me hours and hours of work. And if it is a known problem that can be solved by getting some particular switch as some here claim (but others say they have tried any number without success), why does not DM inform us which ones??? I mean we are talking about using the product for its most basic purpose - watching TV! I have tried any number of other boxes on my setup without any kind of problems.
Now, as if this was not upsetting enough, today I decided to get a new 2.5” SATA HD to be able to record with the product (if Dream Multimedia ever finds a solution to the tuning problem they decided I did not need to know about as they sold me the product).
Having built a number of HTPCs, I consider myself fairly apt at installing computers etc, but I was still surprised to find that there was no motherboard layout and no indication of the fact that you have to use the same SATA-port that is used for the eSATA port in the manual (as far as I could find).
Anyway, as I could find no other port, I figured that has to be it, and as I tried to get the short e-SATA cable out of the port, I find that it is kind of stuck, so I try to jiggle very carefully - and instead och the cable, the whole contact comes loose from the motherboard! It was not soldered in any way, and what is worse, three of the 7 very thin pins were broken, two were left in the contact that came loose and one was only just staying together on the motherboard. The ones that were broken (or broke as the contact came loose) were the three pins that are attacked to the motherboard with a 90 degree bend (one on the middle and two on the side).
Here is my question, is this the way it is supposed to be? Should not that SATA contact be soldered onto the board???
I mean everyone that wants to put an internal hard disk in the thing has to unplug the eSATA cable from the contact, and if it is not soldered on the board, it has to come off quite often, making it very hard to put back in place on the 7 extremely thin pins even if they were not broken as they were (or became) in my case. Perhaps they were broken when the contact was installed, and therefore they skipped soldering hoping no one would ever use it?
I have to say I have never ever experienced anything like this - a fairly expensive product in second revision that has been out for a while that has a problem that means it cannot be used for its very basic standard purpose for many standard setups - and then proves to have this kind of quality, hard to imagine in 2008…
What is Dream Multimedia doing and thinking? I will report back with how this is solved (and if this was they way it was supposed to constructed), today I am just too disappointed to spend even more of my Christmas holiday time on it after getting this off my chest. My spouse already says it has spoiled our Christmas since I have been working on it all the time - and yesterday when I finally got her down to watch a film with the new box - the “tuning failed” appeared as I switched to the HD channel, and then the box has to be rebooted (the GUI won't do) - so she left…