Oh my goodness, this is the most obscure product on planet earth! It is crazy how hard it is to get work. I have had it working for a few seconds and then it seems to die. Been on the line for hours with Sony Tech Support and their basic strategy seems to be to unplug the box and mumble about how incompatible this is with every router on earth. Apparently you need a DLNA compatible router and that is *not* a Apple Extreme or a Linksys WRT-54G. So it seems like you need a new router.
Of course now that Sony is spinning off and basically exiting the TV business who knows what happens to all of this, but here are the steps.
Here are the diagnostic steps:
- If you have a CEC HDMI device plugged in, the thing will fail to boot and fail with a there is no 4K player installed! The only place this is documented is in an Amazon post that causes the problem.
- In our case, it looks like it is the DisplayPort from the Mac Pro and you plug it in, the Sony Media Player crashes. So you have to take out all the HDMI and try it and then see what is conflicting. I’ve no idea why this should be a problem
- DirectTV Genies apparently also have this problem so they can’t be used with the Media Player.
- If you are having problems, then you have to physically unplug the unit to reset the network IP addresses. Even if you push the power off, it doesn’t really reset the network connection. When moving between routers, I had this problem. Unlike many devices, it doesn’t detect changes but needs a hard take the power out to fix.
- You can tell if it is working if there is a progress bar at the top of the 4k logo screen. But there is no way to tell if the FMP-X1 is working at all. It just have a friendly green light if it see the network. If it green it just means it got a dhcp address at some point. To really ale sure it works you have to get down on it and really unplug the device. There appears to be an error at the bottom (there is only
- There are the ton of networking problems. The main thing seems to be to try to have both devices on the same router and the same subnetwork. There is a theory that you need to make the Television work on wireless. That actually hasn’t been a problem. Once I diagnosed the HDMI thing, it seems that was the main problem.
- There is much discussion about getting exactly the right router and making sure to plug it into exactly the right ports.
- Make sure it is connected to HDMI port 4. It will complain if it isn’t.
- There is a rumor that with the 2013 Airport Extreme, you have to hook the TV up wireless and the FMP-X1 wired (the only mode). Good knows why this is?! Sony by the way insists on a wired connection, so go figure. But this wasn’t a problem with our much older airport extreme.
- Don’t try to use outside the US, it checks IP and geofences you out so don’t try overseas.
And finally if you get this working, here are the settings for making the panel look good (or at least accurate) at https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/78476446/XBR-X900%20Settings_2014-2-4.pdf
