Well, its about that time. I have another group of reviews to do over the next few days. For those not familiar with me or my reviews, I started this hobby about 2 months ago and, in that time, I have tried 8 different services on 30 day trials. This is my ongoing mission to review them all. Here are the links to the previous reviews:

https://www.reddit.com/r/IPTVReviews/comments/642g8w/manos_epicstreams_review/

https://www.reddit.com/r/IPTVReviews/comments/64755w/manos_crowntv_review/

https://www.reddit.com/r/IPTVReviews/comments/64csch/manos_voodoo_review/

https://www.reddit.com/r/IPTVReviews/comments/64n4ep/manos_express_review/

Over the next few days, I hope to review FabIPTV and Flawless(Peace Country here on reddit) aswell.

First up is Vader/Pioneer that I bought from my.iprocket.net and the local user /u/insiderip.

The purchase and setup for Vader was pretty simple. Again, for those not familiar with me and my reviews, I am using a Dreamlink T1, so setup is typically a breeze. However, this time, because Vader allows 3 simultaneous streams from the same IP address, I decided to set it up in three rooms of my house. One on the T1, then on the firesticks I have in the basement and the workout room. I also set it up on my generic android box through Kodi so I could get a feel for it on a hardwired android box as opposed to the firesticks.

First of all, the price point is a bit higher on Vader than most services, but its a great value for those looking for the multi-room. At about $15/US, its still a good value considering that extra feature.

Once I set it up on the T1 and got using it, I realized quickly that I was going to love this service! The channel selection is almost everything I could ever want and the picture quality was excellent. You have a good selection of Canadian, US and UK content, but no real international channels for those interested in that. The channel organization was well thought out and easy to understand. It became my wife's favourite service very quickly and, as you all know, that is extremely important for me! She found it an easy service to navigate because everything was well organized and the quality was close to true HD on most channels.

The EPG, which is a huge deal in my house, loads almost completely and is accurate. Unfortunately, the T1 has a glitch that causes it to lose the EPG info for about 4-5 hours every evening and this became a big issue for me with the service. However, in Kodi, this was not an issue at all. It worked perfectly. When I used the firesticks or the android box, my guide loaded fully no matter what time it was, so this was a Dreamlink issue, not a Vader issue. Of course, in my house, where my wife and daughter rule the roost, switching them to Kodi from the ease of the Dreamlink was not happening!

Now, for reliability, I will say there was some issues. I noticed some channels that we watch regularly, like the Sky movie channels and Disney XD, went down and took a significant amount of time to come back, if at all. To this day, Disney XD is still down and its been almost 3 weeks. For the most part, though, the service was reliable on other channels and the sports channels all seemed to work very well with high quality feeds. I rarely had buffering to speak of in either Kodi or on the Dreamlink. When the movie channels came back, they were good quality and worked fine. They were down about 3 or 4 days if I remember right. Overall, its hard to complain about the quality of the feeds or the reliability. As with all IPTV, there will be issues, and Vader's were minor compared to some.

The VOD selection is smaller than many services that I have tried, although bigger than some others, but it worked well on the Dreamlink and on the android box. On the Firesticks, though, it was unwatchable. I have to assume that was a connection issue.

Overall, I really liked this service. The Kodi experience is where it really shines! The custom build is great, the EPG is great, the channel changes are pretty fast for Kodi, the picture quality is excellent. Setup was easy and you have full access to all the VOD and timeshifting through Kodi. Unfortunately, for me, that's not my primary viewing method and it wasn't worth it for me to renew my subscription for the other two rooms. If Dreamlink ever fixes the EPG data loss issue with the handful of providers I've noticed it happens with (its not just Vader), then I might give them another go.

As always, if you feel I've left anything out or haven't addressed something you want addressed, feel free to ask questions and I'll do my best to answer.

Mano