I've decided to bin off my Sky+ HD subscription and go over to Freesat - And my HDR-1000S arrived yesterday
I found the setup very painless, quick and easy - I was up and viewing in no time. Picture quality is good, user interface is pretty intuitive. I tested out the iPlayer and again was very pleased, simple to use and the quality was spot on.
The only down side I've come across so far is with the media player function of the box. I have a Synology Diskstation DS212J NAS which I keep all my music/pictures/films on and I thought the HDR-1000S would might even replace my dedicated media, which would just about be the icing on the cake.
Anyhow, I navigated to the Media Player bit, but found no servers - I was hoping to be able to browse NFS/Samba shares, but it seems it's DLNA only. Not a problem, I enabled the DLNA server on the Diskstation and was soon browsing through my media. Then I tried to play back a few movies, but it seems the HDR can't handle DTS - what a shame! Also, the aspect ratio was out on pretty much everything - 1920*800 gets stretched instead of being shown in a letterbox.
Naturally I tried to adjust the aspect ratio in the menu, but it doesn't seem to do anything - all the options just present the same format! Luckily TV is shown in the correct aspect, but it seems that the HDR isn't going to replace my media player any time soon.
In conclusion, I'm really pleased with my HDR-1000S. I bought it to replace my Sky box, not my media player and as far as I'm concerned it's more than up to the job. It's media playing functions are totally secondary and hopefully the audio/aspect ratio issues will get ironed out in the future.