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+--- Thread: Zbox hd-id11 (/showthread.php?tid=73052)
- VCDmonger - 2010-09-17
The Zbox HD-ID11 is in a combo deal on Newegg today with free 2GB memory AND a $20 MIR on the Zbox:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ComboDealDetails.aspx?ItemList=Combo.509745
I was in the market for a ION/ION2 HTPC, and I've read this entire thread; based on my needs (XBMC box with low power consumption, low noise [w/BIOS update], able to play 1080p mkvs without problem) I decided to order this combo deal today!
Since it comes with 2GB memory (which everyone says is enough, plus trying to find a cheap 4GB 200-pin SODIMM is impossible), all I added to the order was an SSD. I got the OCZ Vertex Series OCZSSD2-1VTX60G 60GB because of the $20 rebate (today is the last day for it):
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227394
All in all my order had $40 worth of rebates (I hope they're honored), plus I happened to have a gift card balance on Newegg which made for a very low-priced order. Hopefully I get it next week and nothing is DOA so I can start using it right away. The current plan is to use a minimal install of Win7.
- cfb2 - 2010-09-18
wiz561 Wrote:Hi all... I just picked this box up yesterday and so far, I'm liking it. I found that it wasn't bad to get it up and running, and made a wiki page available for those who may need help installing it.
A lot of the commands I did off the top of my head, but hopefully it will help anybody that's having problems.
http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=HOW-TO:_Install_XBMC_on_ZBOXHD-ID11
Please let me know or make changes to it as you see need fit. Thanks!
Good guide, thanks for taking the time to put it together.
I'd leave the hyperthreading on. You will get some performance benefit and there arent many circumstances where you'll get a performance hit or no benefit.
The atom has a very long in-order pipeline, which can ding the performance vs other core architecture processors that use shorter out-of-order pipelines. HT can help reduce the performance loss a bit. Its definitely not going to give you quad core performance, but ~10% boost is pretty likely.
- JRock - 2010-09-20
Awesome guide, thanks! I was able to get the audio working using the XBMCFreak out of the box.
I am noticing that I have menu audio but when I drop into watching a movie and stop the movie; the menu audio no longer works. I can play any TV show or movie and still have audio just not at the XBMC screen.
Any Ideas?
- matchsmalone - 2010-09-20
JRock Wrote:Awesome guide, thanks! I was able to get the audio working using the XBMCFreak out of the box.
I am noticing that I have menu audio but when I drop into watching a movie and stop the movie; the menu audio no longer works. I can play any TV show or movie and still have audio just not at the XBMC screen.
Any Ideas?
This worked for me:
http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=77937
- wiz561 - 2010-09-20
I ran into a small glitch over the weekend that everybody should probably know about.
I was running beta2 of xbmcfreak dharma distro. I did an 'apt-get update && apt-get upgrade && apt-get dist-upgrade' to update everything. I got a new kernel, along with an odd dpkg error message about something or other failing. I didn't think much of it until I rebooted and the audio broke. Now I believe the audio broke because I updated the kernel, but who knows.
So, I popped my thumb drive in and started to reinstall. When it got to the partitioning screen, the box locked up when it was at 33% partitioning the '/' root partition with ext4. Rebooted the box, same exact problem. Re-'burned' the iso to the usb, same problem.
Thought maybe the hard drive was goofy, so I burned darik's boot and nuke to try to get it to wipe the drive. When it was going to wipe, it crashed. Booted an original ubuntu server ISO, still crashed at the 33%. Booted the original ISO to a shell prompt to manually partition with fdisk and mkfs, and mkfs locked the machine when it was creating the inodes.
Took the hard drive into another machine, and was able to install xbmc just fine. Popped the drive into the zbox and it booted xbmc fine. Some success...but it still bothered me that I couldn't get it to format. It also was an issue because I had no net connectivity with that as well since I installed it on another box.
After a few hours, I remembered I had some other memory from my old laptop. Popped that stuff in, and everything worked fine.
Sooooo.... I am about 99% positive that the memory I bought (and suggested on the wiki) either went bad after a week or it was the wrong type. I said get 667mhz memory and Zotac recommended 800mhz. I didn't realize this until today. I went to Fry's today to exchange the memory, and I was absolutely shocked that they took it back without giving me a headache. I got a Patriot PSD22G8002S stick (800mhz) and will try it later tonight. I'm hoping that this whole thing works.
From talking to the tech's at Fry's, the 667Mhz *should* work in the machine as the machine should automatically adjust to the lower speed memory. So, I don't know if the memory was just 'bad' or if the 667 vs 800mhz makes a difference. I know I just made a recommendation on the wiki and wanted to let people know about it before they ran into problems.
- VCDmonger - 2010-09-22
So I received my Zbox HD-ID11 today, and I couldn't be happier with my purchase! After installing the 2GB of RAM and the 60GB SSD, I booted off a Win7 x64 install flash drive. The installation started and finished without a hitch.
I then installed the BIOS update, because the fan noise was loud; now I can't even tell there's a fan at all. After disabling Windows Media Center, installing all the latest drivers, Windows updates, and my custom registry settings for my MCE remote, I installed Dharma beta 2. I then enabled hardware acceleration, and I was playing 1080p mkvs and controlling XBMC with my remote flawlessly! Everything is running perfectly, and I can even S3 suspend and wake the box from my remote.
So far, the HD-ID11 meets all of my expectations, and the install was quick and painless. Let this be a success story to anyone out there planning an XBMC on Windows 7 build with ION/ION2 hardware (especially this box). Of course, my build is only hours old at this point, so many months of usage and testing are in order before drawing a final conclusion.
I want to thank everyone who contributed to this thread, and I'll keep you posted on the status of my Zbox, if anything changes.
- BoxFreak - 2010-09-23
Hi all! Just installed Live on this box. Audio through hdmi is working fine, but it seems that every time I start to play video or music, the sound is muted at first and comes out after half a second or so. I assume that my amp has a delay when it syncs with Zotac´s outgoing signal.
Is it possible to delay audio startup in XBMC to avoid this problem? For example Squeezeboxes have this feature where you can adjust audio startup time.
audio delay - wiz561 - 2010-09-28
Boxfreak, what do other digital devices do when connected to your amp?
The reason why I ask is because my receiver takes about a second for it to click/lock onto the digital stream. This is normal and there's nothing you can do to change it.
I was wondering if you could compare it to some other device to just verify that it's the receiver and not the box. Another test is to try to play a digital file at the command line with aplay and see what happens. But, I'm pretty sure it's the receiver that's the delay and nothing else.
WEP Problems - angrycamel - 2010-09-28
I recently ordered this box from Newegg with 2GB RAM and a 4GB Patriot USB stick to install to. After installing XBMCFreak from a 2GB USB stick to the final install home of the Patriot stick I was up and running without a HDD. Next came the configuration.
Most everything was fine thanks to the fine folks who have posted the tutorials on here and the wiki. (thanks by the way). However despite the past two nights of tinkering, I was unable to get WEP (64 bit or 128 bit) to connect successfully. It would always crap out during the authentication.
I was first working from the tutorials and editing /etc/networking/interfaces manually but after following every tutorial google could find and still coming up without a connection (blue wifi light would blink but never connect) I found a post about installing wicd and running wicd-curses. After getting that installed and setup, it too could not connect, always getting stuck on authentication. SO I knew it must not be something I was doing wrong at this point since there are many praises to the wicd name out there for working miracles for wireless setup.
I finally caved and logged into my router (provided by Verizon for our FioS internet service) and setup WPA2 instead of WEP. Low and behold, my new ZBOX connected right away and I now have wireless!
So is it just me, or is WEP troublesome for other folks too?
------
Correction. I guess I spoke too soon. I just decided to do a reboot to make sure everything stayed connected afterwards and it didn't unfortunately. I jumped to CLI and started wicd again. It will not connect now. It shows a lot of hex data separated by slashes just before the Authenticating... message on the bottom of the screen but then after a few minutes it comes back and just says "not connected"
Any thoughts?
Wireless Working After Reboot - angrycamel - 2010-09-28
I fixed the above mentioned problem and my Zbox will now retain it's wireless connection after a reboot.
It looks like the problem was caused by a conflict with network-manager
The following fixed my problem of not being able to connect after a reboot.
Code:
sudo aptitude remove network-manager
sudo /etc/init.d/wicd restart(based on the following post in the Ubuntu bug track: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/wicd/+bug/540070/comments/18)
- BoxFreak - 2010-09-28
wiz561 Wrote:Boxfreak, what do other digital devices do when connected to your amp?
The reason why I ask is because my receiver takes about a second for it to click/lock onto the digital stream. This is normal and there's nothing you can do to change it.
I was wondering if you could compare it to some other device to just verify that it's the receiver and not the box. Another test is to try to play a digital file at the command line with aplay and see what happens. But, I'm pretty sure it's the receiver that's the delay and nothing else.
Yes it´s a feature of my Sony receiver I think. But other sources (for example Squeezebox) have this possibility to send for example 1s of silence before music starts so that receiver has time to sync with source. And my PS3 has audio out always on --> no problem when starting music or video.
Is it possible to get the audio out being always on in XBMC?
And another sound problem, when playing music with crossfading enabled (for example party mode), there´s no sound in every other song (error "Failed to initialize audio device"). If I turn crossfading off there´s no problem. What could be reason for this?
PS. My box is running quite hot, GPU is always over 100C, is this normal?
- tocheeba - 2010-09-28
I read through this whole thread, but I just want to confirm:
-This will run XBMC with 2GB of RAM under Windows 7 just fine, right?
-I want to throw 1080p MKV bluray rips at it. These will play stutter-free under Windows 7?
I hate Linux (I'm at a noob at it). I prefer Windows 7. I've read LInux is better, but I'm more comfortable with Windows, so I'd prefer to use that as long as it works fine.
Any help is appreciated. I plan on picking this up from Frys today if I can get an answer on this
And should this RAM work for it:?http://www.frys.com/product/5459759?site=sr:SEARCH:MAIN_RSLT_PG
- VCDmonger - 2010-09-30
tocheeba Wrote:I read through this whole thread, but I just want to confirm:
-This will run XBMC with 2GB of RAM under Windows 7 just fine, right?
-I want to throw 1080p MKV bluray rips at it. These will play stutter-free under Windows 7?
I hate Linux (I'm at a noob at it). I prefer Windows 7. I've read LInux is better, but I'm more comfortable with Windows, so I'd prefer to use that as long as it works fine.
Any help is appreciated. I plan on picking this up from Frys today if I can get an answer on this
http://www.frys.com/product/5459759?site=sr:SEARCH:MAIN_RSLT_PG
My previous post was literally designed to let people planning a Win7 build with this Zbox know that it works great! Honestly it was an extremely simple installation, and yes, 1080p mkvs play with no problem. I literally have not had any problems whatsoever with the box, and 2GB of RAM is plenty. I see no reason why the memory you selected would not work; it's not on the tested memory list, but neither was my memory and it works great. I hope this is enough to convince you!
- tocheeba - 2010-09-30
VCDMonger - I bought it, and it's working good
However, loading into some menus takes a bit longer than expected, and minimizing video to go to the menus is a little choppy too, but I'm guessing that's because of the Atom processor.
updates - wiz561 - 2010-10-01
Hi all...
I've been reading through the last couple of posts and wanted to make a few comments...
-> For the network manager and the wireless stuff... Yeah, I forgot about that. Ubuntu has had this problem with the network manager messing up the network connection. The only time I've had issues with this was war-driving with kismet. Ultimately, I'm glad that you figured it out. This might be something xbmcfreak might want to disable because, after all, I don't believe there's a need for it since you're not running gnome, kde, or some other x manager...well, you are, but it's not like there's a lot of widgets in it.
-> For the receiver issue. I like the idea of having xbmc add a second delay to the audio, but I believe that this would have to be submitted in the 'enhancements' section of the forum. Some sort of option in the settings to allow a blank before video/audio startup.
As far as the audio init failure, I can't comment on it. The only time I ran into this audio init failure was when I updated the kernel. At the same time, I haven't tried the music stuff on the zbox box before. Being that it only happens in the music part, you might want to try posting this in the linux questions section of the forum. If I have some time this weekend, I might give it a shot and see if I get the same errors. To be honest, I don't think I'm going to have the time to try it on my part...so to help, you might want to check the ~/.xbmc/temp/xbmc.log file for hints.
-> For the guy buying the memory. This is the memory I purchased after I bought the wrong kind the first time. So far, I can say that I have had zero issues with this new memory. It must be the 800mhz.
-> The last thing is the temperature. Yes, the box runs hot. Everybody always talks about it running hot. I've been watching HD on it for about 2.5 hours now and my sensors command returns 44c/109f. Some things I would do would be update the bios, and reposition the zbox. I had it laying horizontal on the rubber feet...so the glowing blue 'x' is facing up. The temp would get really hot when the box was like this, and I attribute it to the fact that the holes were being constricted because they were put on the bottom, and the 1/4" feet weren't allowing enough airflow. I attached the adapter to the zbox so it stands vertical, so the 'x' in the blue zbox is pointing towards me, and it brought the temperatures down 10 to 15 degrees. So, try the BIOS updates and make sure the bios is set to default (or optimal settings). Then, try to add the stand so that the box is standing up and see what happens.
good luck!