Monsoon Multimedia 010410VL - Vulkano Lava (4GB SD Card) - The Complete TV Companion!

• Watch & control your TV from anywhere in the world on any mobile device; stream TV wirelessly around your home
• Schedule TV recordings from your mobile device from anywhere in the world to Vulkano's internal 4GB memory card
• Transfer favorite TV recordings from Vulkano to your mobile from anywhere in the world over Wi-Fi or 3G
• Watch YouTube videos on your big screen TV
• Access photos, home videos, music PCs, smartphones or NAS storage and play them on your big screen TV using UPnP

I received my Vulkano Lava w/4GB memory card yesterday, and have spent the last 24 hours fiddling and fighting with all of the settings. It has not been an easy experience. I would say that this is a good example of a decent hardware product but a clunky app to configure it, as well as buggy software that drives the guts of the streamer. When you first plug in the device, it downloads the latest firmware for the box (letting me know I had a viable internet connection), after which it walks you through the initial configuration of the settings. The problem with this is that many of the descriptions make the assumption that you know what they mean. For instance, can anyone tell me what a "digital non-build" means? I still don't know. Do I have Comcast/Palo Alto or Comcast/Cupertino? You end up guessing, or saying "I don't care" in your first pass through it. Once you start playing with things, then you finally come to understand what most of the terms you previously did not understand mean. I would say it took me 2-4 passes through the setup menu before I got most of the settings correct. I understand that the Monsoon help desk probably could have whisked me through the setup much faster, but then I wouldn't know what any of this means, would I? Yes, I'm stubborn that way.

If you have it, opt for the Wi-Fi interface and save yourself hours, if not days, of head-bashing. Like others on the Monsoon forum pages and here on the comments page, I initially thought I would connect my Lava to my Apple Airport Extreme via an ethernet cable. Should be faster than Wi-Fi, right? Instead, my initial attempts at streaming a signal to my brother several hundred miles away were a disaster. A very lousy picture at his end, far worse than the worst YouTube video there is. After a couple of hours of getting nowhere, I removed the ethernet connection and selected Wi-Fi, pointed the Lava to this connection, and immediately my brother was stunned at how much better the picture had become. There are some serious issues with the Lava's wired ethernet interface under some conditions (no need to dwell on the specifics here) that simply do not exist if you use the Wi-Fi connection. If the receiving party sees things like stuttering video, non-synchronized audio and video, a fuzzy image, 3 or 4 frames per second, it is a sure sign that you are experiencing data packet corruption between the Lava and your router. It has little, if anything, to do with problems at the receiving end where there is nothing to do but receive the bits, decompress them, and paste the images on the screen. Packet corruption is instantly fixed when you use Wi-Fi. Do yourself a favor and select the Wi-Fi connection. Leave the internet follies for the smart guys who understand what DHCP and subnet mask mean!

PIcture quality: When you finally get things working, you will see at the receiving PC or Mac that the best possible picture size is 720x480. This is standard "HD DVD" size, not "high-def" like 720p or 1080p. You may pump your uber-clean 1080p signal into the Lava, but that isn't what gets streamed! On top of that, there is compression of the 720x480 video, needed to keep streaming bit rates to an acceptably low figure that does not choke your cable uploads. The quality of the received video depends entirely on the bitrate of the stream. By my math, 2.2Mbps is the equivalent of a 1GB/hour mp4 file, which usually looks pretty good. No doubt the Lava uses .mp4 for its compression. If your stream rate is in the 2 Mbps range, you will probably be viewing a good picture on your computer. Less than that, and you'll start seeing compression artifacts.

Other variables in your viewing experience are the size of your display and whether you view the picture at 1x size or blow it up to fullscreen. While you can blow the Lava image up to full size on your 27" iMac, or your 70" hi-def TV, you will also be exposing any warts in the compressed movie. Personally, I find that when I blow up the image to fullscreen on my 27" iMac AND the bit rate is running at about 2.5Mbps, it's still a very crisp image. But if the bit rate starts to drop, it's another matter. If the bit rate gets into the 1Mbps range, you're probably best off setting the viewer to the 2x or 1x mode. The ultimate in any viewing test is how crisp small text appears. When it starts looking fuzzy, decrease the size of the viewing window. The receiving player shows the incoming stream data rate at the bottom of its window. I noticed that it takes a minute or two after firing up the viewer before the image quality settles in. Don't judge the picture until after this wait. My brother and I timed about a 6 second delay between what I was seeing on my TV and what he saw on his viewer.

Using the Mac viewer, both my brother and I were able to simultaneously view the video that I was streaming from my TV. From this, it's fair to say that you can have simultaneous multiple viewers although I don't know if it's 2 or 10. I fired up my viewer app while my brother was watching his viewer, and he observed no change in his image quality when I logged on. Your mileage may vary. Be mindful that I don't think this is true when you stream to a phone, which I did not try. Streaming to a phone will cost you money for the phone app. The computer viewer app, however, is free.

There seems to be some confusion about the storage card on the Lava. I thought it would be helpful to talk about it. First, it IS removable. It plugs in on the left side of the box (looking at the face). It is NOT internal. It is a standard push-push to insert-eject connector.

Along with my Lava, I ordered a Transcend 32GB SDHC SD card (TS32GSDHC10E) because a couple of other commenters mentioned you could upgrade from the included 4GB card to larger sizes. I believe the important spec for any card is that it be a "Class 10" device, which means "fast." When you first run the Setup routine for the Lava, it will initialize whatever card is plugged into the slot. Out of the box, I was initially wary of pulling the 4GB card and replacing it with this 32GB card, so I left the 4GB card in place. I then ended up formatting the 4GB card as part of the setup procedure.

24 hours later, I figured it was time to remove the 4GB card and initialize the 32GB card. I swapped out the cards, then entered the SETTINGS:ADVANCED SETUP:STORAGE window. The screen said "read-only" but no amount of memory was indicated. At first I thought I had the card's write protect tab on, but it was not. There is nothing else you can do in this window but exit it by clicking OK on the remote. I expected an option to format the card, but there was nothing. I went back and forth several times, and each time when I clicked on OK, I was thrown back to the Advanced Setup window. No signs of "want to initialize this card?" I went into the STORAGE window again, and sat there for a couple of minutes, pondering what to do next. But this time, when I exited the window with an OK button push, I was finally given the option to format the card. I think the key this time was waiting long enough in the STORAGE window for the system to fully read the card's parameters(?), and that in previous attempts I had bailed out of the window before this read operation had finished. But this is just a guess. Others may want to refine my observation.

I then followed the instructions to format the card, and off it went. The 32GB card took a long time to format, maybe 15-20 minutes. An on-screen progress bar indicates how far into the formatting it is, but it seemed to stall at about the 90% mark. Be patient. After the formatting was done, it told me I had 28.0GB available. Yee-haw!

Once you get the settings nailed down, then the operation is pretty smooth. The biggest issue you will probably face, once you get the streaming working right, is selecting your Set Top Box (STB) model. I want to give it 5 stars because once it's working, it works well. But i knock off one star because of the difficulty it requires to get it working in the first place, and another star because of the often-confusing setup menus, dreadful UI, and buggy ethernet drivers. Remember: if you initially are getting a bad picture at the receiving end, it's almost 100% certain that the problem is between the Lava and your router, which has to be corrected. In a system like this, it's all in the streamer, not the receiver!

Buy Monsoon Multimedia 010410VL - Vulkano Lava (4GB SD Card) - The Complete TV Companion! Now

For those who will see this as TL:DR, let me cut to the chase. Don't buy a Monsoon/Hava/Vulkano product. There has been a service outage for more than a month with no press release or admission by management that there is even a problem. Tech support have promised for weeks that the service would be restored "by the end of the week". Each week has come and gone and still no updates and no service. The company has effectively abandoned their customers and left us with bricked devices.

Full review: I Purchased a Lava in February 2012 and connected it to a DirecTV HR20 receiver, via component cable, with the display output over HDMI to my projector. Using either composite or component is required due to HDCP (DRM) restrictions on HDMI output. As a previous reviewer pointed out, this takes your pristine 1080p signal and dumbs it down to standard def. I knew this going in and, as I would mostly be streaming to a 4.6" phone screen, could live with it. I found it to be a decent value compared to Sling or out-of-band solutions like TiVo-to-go and DirecTV Nomad.

Setup was certainly not TiVo smooth but also was not particularly difficult. The interface allows you to step through the configuration and the remote is busy but well laid out. The IR bug did not control the satellite receiver and finally, after finding this to be a common issue on the support forums, I used the front IR transmitter to bounce the signal to the receiver. This involved the decidedly low-tech solution of putting the Lava on top of the STB and taping a piece of paper over both IR ports (so they could bounce the signal to each other). The unit also gets very hot and only uses passive cooling (no fans). Accepted that this wasn't a perfect technology but would be acceptable for light streaming to my phone.

The clients for Android, OSX, and Windows are all similar enough and allow you to access the main features of the device. None of the interfaces mirror the features of the setup screens on the Lava itself although there is a Windows program to do basic setup. My PC client will crash every time I use the return/enter key when searching for a show (have to click the on-screen button). All clients are unnecessarily chatty and seemingly reach out to Monsoon to initialize your device. Live TV streaming is pixelated but viewable over a 4G connection with occasional stuttering. If you're expecting HBO GO or Netflix, move along. This is on-the-fly encoding of live TV and it works but looks like crap, period.

The biggest surprise for me, even after doing my research, was the electronic program guide (EPG). I didn't realize how basic the system is and that it is missing what I consider some core DVR features. If you are coming from a TiVo or any modern STB (cable, fios or sat), you will be disappointed. The EPG is extremely basic, the search feature is inconsistent, there are no "season pass" features (a huge negative for me), and the system relies on Monsoon for all updates. There is no way to use a third-party guide and firmware development looks to be stagnant or simply non-existent. The EPG covers roughly the upcoming 1.5 weeks and, without a recurring episode feature, requires me to remember to schedule every single episode of every show. Forget to schedule a recording? The Lava will not "tivo" it for you, you just miss it and hope for a repeat. Monsoon having problems pushing updates? Then you have no guide and are blind when scheduling a recording. Think that shows on channel 200 at 8pm? Maybe it is, maybe it's not. There have been two outages that I'm aware of since I've owned the Lava during which time the guide went blank (no updates for > 1.5 weeks). The most recent outage is still on-going and has been so for well over a month. Customer support has provided the same canned response (we changed EPG providers, there are problems with the updates, service should be restored in a week) with only an an occasional, partial guide update. My guide is now completely dark but support told me service should be back in a week or so. I should have sent the Lava back when I had the chance and now deeply regret not doing so.

Based on the complete silence from management (last Twitter from Feb 2012 and silence on FB) my guess would be the company has run out of cash and/or couldn't maintain it's contract with the EPG provider. I can't imagine a modern hardware/software company not having QA and testing processes in place to validate a new EPG provider. They're probably swirling the drain and leaving us with hunks of useless plastic on our media shelves.

Read Best Reviews of Monsoon Multimedia 010410VL - Vulkano Lava (4GB SD Card) - The Complete TV Companion! Here

The Vulkano is a great piece of kit for the price. It does all it says it will. You need to be a little bit Tech savy to set it up. The set up is not hard. The previous poster had trouble with his remote to control his set top box. The remote is a learning remote but it does not always learn the first time around. However, with patience, it will learn all your commands and you can save this as a bin file.

The few things that could be improved are the software. There are a few annoying this things that do not have options to switch them off or on. Eg the setup wizard always wastes time looking for updates before it starts, there should be an option to set for when it looks for updates.

The remote viewer always looks for your Vulkano as soon as you start the software. If you have more than one vulklano it will try to connect to the last one you were connected to for some time before it gives up. No menus can be accessed during this time. There should be an option to let you start the application first then choose which Vulkano to connect to because you may have one local and one remotely placed for example.

Picture quality and compression could also be improved. It saves an mp4 onto the SD card at a rate of about 1hr to 1GB for near DVD quality. However, the quality only really warrants 1/2 that amount of space.

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This is a day one review, so I may be back for updates. Just consider this to be more initial thoughts than a full review.

First off, let me say that I saw the reviews complaining of a difficult setup.. I don't get it.. everything was extremely straightforward.. I didn't even have to look at the instructions.

Connect your set top box to the Vulkano using the included component cable(and the composite cable for sound), and connect the Vulkano to your tv with either HDMI or component.. whatever your set top box was connected with before the Vulkano. Plug in the IR blaster and aim it at the IR receiver on the front of your Set top box.. if you can't see it, shine a flashlight on it. Finally plug the Vulkano into power, and turn everything on.. the Vulkano then walks you through the software side of the setup , including setting up your network, configuring your router, and choosing your tv provider. After that you are all set.

The one snag I ran into, and it's why I'm starting at 4 stars instead of 5, is that they didn't have my tv provider listed in their database. What this ultimately means is that I can't use their program guide to schedule recordings(i have to manually enter the time and channel to record), and changing channels on the remote applications is a little slower because I have to do so through remote commands. A call to their tech support line was answered promptly and the gentleman I spoke to was helpful in explaining how to skip the guide setup. He told me to send in an email with my provider details so they could add it to the database. When/if that happens, I will update.

UPDATE: I found my tv provider listed under a nearby zipcode, so I was able to get the guide working.. no issues whatsoever. I can now choose recordings from the standard guide grid.

So far I've tried both the Mac and PC viewing applications on my home network, and they work as expected. On Monday I will try the Mac application from my office to see how the off-network viewing is.. this is one thing I could never get my old Slingbox to do at all.. perhaps because of a slow internet connection at home.

I haven't tried it out yet, but it appears you can record content directly to your computer using their software.. this may come in handy because the 4GB SD card included will only record about 4 hours of content at high quality(based on the Vulkanos estimate after scheduling a 1hr recording).

I also have a spare 16GB card that I will throw in later to beef up the on-device storage. I will update if I experience any difficulty in using it.

UPDATE: put the 16Gb card into the Vulkano, and it immediately asked if I wanted to format it. I answered yes, and it formatted in about 10 minutes. Straightforward and no issues.

UPDATE 1: one small annoyance.. and it's only a stroke of bad luck.. the IR signal that my sound bar uses for volume up and volume down is the same signal that the Vulkano uses to schedule a recording and invoke it's menu. Luckily the Vulkano also has it's own volume control so I can use that.. just have to reprogram my universal remote.

UPDATE DAY 3: I got to my office this morning, and fired up the Vulkano player software on my laptop.. it connected to the Vulkano back at home with no problem, with no further configuration necessary, and is streaming nearly flawlessly. I'm now bumping my review to 5 stars, as the Vulkano unit has handled every task with little trouble.

Highly recommended!

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Purchased the Vulkano Lava about 1 month ago. Very easy to use and great customer support. Set-up was easy,unfortunately I received my Vulkano when they did not have an EPG server, so I had to call customer support to help with configuring unit to bypass this. Technician answered phone quickly and walked me through the setup within 5 minutes. Also had to call back to configure the device to work with my firewall, again quick response and easy to setup. EPG server is now working and it is as easy to work as your cable or sat DVR. Inserted a 16gb sd card vs 4 gb card they supplied and no issue. Probably will go purchase a 32 gb next. If you have dvr with your cable or sat provider, easy to access and stream that as well. Benefit of using Vulkano is that you can transfer the file to your computer, ipad to watch offline (no wifi or 3g).

Player works well from windows pc computer, apple laptop and apple ipad. Have used in 3g and wifi service. Sometimes have drops when using over 3g service, but not sure if this is vulkano or 3g issue. Have fewer issues with drops when using vulkano around house with PC or Ipad. My children access the vulkano from their college dorms over thousand miles away without issue.

Only issue is sometimes we all want to access Vulkano at the same time and only 1 of us can watch, football season.