Quagmire Posted June 7, 2010 Report Share Posted June 7, 2010 Hi all, ordered my X920BT last week and installed it this weekend. Lurked for a week or so without registering before ordering the unit trying to decide on which head unit to go with. AVIC411 was a big help to me in deciding which way to go and how to get it installed properly. Thanks! OK, so I have a 2009 Mustang GT500 coupe with factory nav. I was perfectly happy with it until my wife got a new Fusion Sport with Sync, and after playing with that system for awhile I had to have blue tooth and media capability (USB/iPhone). Sync is available as a retrofit kit for the 2009 Mustang, but I would have had to downgrade to the stock radio unit - no nav, no touch screen, etc... Yeah, that wasn't going to happen. After looking around, the Pioneer units looked good to me and I settled on the X920BT as a final choice. I used the C2R-FRD1 adapter harness to install the unit. I know there are cheaper harnesses out there, but I didn't feel like hunting wires to get everything working. This harness brought everything together in one place and made for an easy install. I didn't do the handbrake bypass (yet), but I did wire a SPST relay to the accessory line to pass fused 10 amp 12vdc to the unit instead of the 1 amp 12vdc Retained Accessory Power the harness module provides. I installed the blue tooth mic on the top of the steering wheel column, behind the steering wheel just in front of the gauges. I bought the Pioneer ND-BC4 rear view camera as well, and have it wired in and working, but haven't run the camera to the rear of the car yet. It's just lying in the front passenger floorboard at the moment. Everything works as advertised. The blue tooth for the phone works great, voice recognition works, nav is OK (I think I liked my stock nav better), media and iPod/iPhone functionality is awesome. I'm pretty pleased with it so far. I do wish it would play wma lossless encoded files, but that is a fairly minor gripe. I do have one issue at the moment though... I loaded a bunch of .m4v movies that I'd encoded using Handbrake with the "iPhone & iPod Touch" preset onto a 16GB SD card. Half of them play, half of them won't. With the ones that won't play I get a "skipping unsupported format" message. I ripped these DVDs myself, used DVD Shrink to remove the extraneous stuff and then used Handbrake to encode them. As far as I can remember I used the exact same settings to encode them all, and I am perplexed as to why some play and some do not. Anyone have any thoughts about this? Is there any good way to look at the encoding details of the video files so I can try and figure out why some play and some do not? Quote Link to post Share on other sites
rgarjr Posted June 7, 2010 Report Share Posted June 7, 2010 These head units are very picky in the type of format the videos need to be in.. which is why a lot of AVIC owners have put many hours experimenting which video formats work on the SD cards/Flash Drives. Some have gotten lucky, others have simply failed to get them to play. The owners manual gives some settings to use, but others have reported being incorrect. I have had good results encoding them to XVID (AVI) format. Quote Link to post Share on other sites
VBLUE42 Posted June 7, 2010 Report Share Posted June 7, 2010 Yea this has been a issue with Pioneer head units sense the first unit with an SD or USB connection was released and it has not gotten any better with this years units. Your opening yourself up for a lot of frustration with this approach so it is best to stick with what works and that is with iPod devices. Quote Link to post Share on other sites
Quagmire Posted June 7, 2010 Author Report Share Posted June 7, 2010 Yeah. This does seem to be a common issue. Oh well, it isn't like I'm going to be watching movies very often (if ever). Thanks! Quote Link to post Share on other sites
kculp Posted June 9, 2010 Report Share Posted June 9, 2010 Just put mine in a 2002 Mustang the other day- I really like it although don't have much to compare. My PND does a better job with street names, so I hear ya on that one. These units seem to lock on to satellites really quickly though, put my antenna under the dash and does fine. Video does best playing from the iPod Touch - but not played with different settings yet or put on SD. I don't like how the video stretches out though - since I have a 3G 60GB iPod the videos are not the key drawing factor. I also put the BT mike above the steering wheel and it works fine. Really disappointed in the implementation of RDS (as others have said here), the radio station banner and song title is confined to a little box when tuned in FM. I hope they fix that, but probably won't. Between RDS and better street name - those would be key ways to improve the unit if Pioneer is listening. Quote Link to post Share on other sites
Quagmire Posted June 11, 2010 Author Report Share Posted June 11, 2010 Initially I had the GPS antenna sitting on top of the head unit, and I pretty much got 0 bars of reception. Nav worked, but I rarely got more than 4 satellites. Spent some time today moving the GPS antenna to the top of an AC duct, just under the top of the dash. I used the metal stick-on plate as a base for the antenna. 2 bars of reception out of 3 now, and had 8 satellites right away. Much better. The nav display seems kind of laggy though, unless I'm driving really slowly the display has me ~ 30-50 feet behind my actual position. I guess I can live with that. Quote Link to post Share on other sites
rgarjr Posted June 11, 2010 Report Share Posted June 11, 2010 Yes I also have mine lagging a bit. I originally had my GPS ant on top of my dash but I didn't like looking it up there. So I moved it underneath the dash for the stealth look. Quote Link to post Share on other sites
Quagmire Posted June 12, 2010 Author Report Share Posted June 12, 2010 I finished the Pioneer ND-BC4 backup camera install today. Ran the wiring down the passenger side into the trunk. Pulling the interior panels and rear seat cushion was cake, much easier than I'd feared it would be. I initially mounted the camera in place of the key lock, but it's a wide angle camera and looking out through the key hole was like looking through a porthole, could only see a small area directly behind the center of the car. Ended up running the camera out through a grommet in the bottom of the trunk, up behind the bumper fascia and out through the opening for the license plate light. It is attached at the top of the license plate area, right next to the light. I had to cut a small groove at the edge of the opening with a round file to keep the cable from being squashed, but that was easy to do. The camera is small and you won't see it unless you're looking for it. The camera is designed to be mounted externally, so it should hold up to the elements. We'll have to wait and see how it holds up. At any rate, I now have a beautiful wide angle view from the rear bumper when reversing, and I can set the nav display to show the camera view on part of the screen during normal driving. I'm really pleased with the end result. Quote Link to post Share on other sites
rgarjr Posted June 12, 2010 Report Share Posted June 12, 2010 Where's the pics at? Quote Link to post Share on other sites
Quagmire Posted June 12, 2010 Author Report Share Posted June 12, 2010 haha, ok... OK, here are some crappy iPhone pics... Camera installed on the rear bumper: http://www.getthefrakout.net/gt500/back ... G_0155.JPG Backup camera view: http://www.getthefrakout.net/gt500/back ... G_0160.JPG Camera view nav screen: http://www.getthefrakout.net/gt500/back ... G_0161.JPG Sorry about the glare, but my car is in a dim garage and there is a lot of glare off of my wife's Fusion. Quote Link to post Share on other sites
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