Zbox hd-id11 - Printable Version

Zbox hd-id11 - Printable Version

+- Kodi Community Forum (https://forum.kodi.tv)
+-- Forum: Discussions (https://forum.kodi.tv/forumdisplay.php?fid=222)
+--- Forum: Hardware (https://forum.kodi.tv/forumdisplay.php?fid=112)
+--- Thread: Zbox hd-id11 (/showthread.php?tid=73052)

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

- Goge - 2010-06-07

This may seem like an odd question but as anyone got the front audio to work? The green mini-jack for the headphones. I have followed the instructions here and got hdmi to work but the front headphone jack doesn't work.

thanks

- voip-ninja - 2010-06-07

If I can ask a possibly stupid question about the Zotac box. From what I see in all the advertising for both the MAG and the HD it advertises 8 channel audio out.

Is this 8 channel out over HDMI and is it able to pass HD audio tracks if XBMC is appropriately configured?

- noem - 2010-06-07

Does anyone have trouble playing divix/xvid with zbox I can play 1080 p with no problem bit when it comes to low res formats I get a green screen. Im using 10.05 latest SVN.
thx

- danbst - 2010-06-10

Using 911livev14 DivX is very good indeed, No greenscreen.
I've not heaped a lot of praise, mainy due to noise but upscaling Xvid it does do very well.

- wonslung - 2010-06-11

I'm going kinda nuts....i had everything working on ubuntu 10.4 amd64 but the xbmc-svn ppa got screwed up and somehow i couldn't reinstall xbmc (i had tried a nightly build but it didn't work, which is what caused me to end up with the problem i'm having now)

annnnnyways, i've since reinstalled everything and now, for the life of me, i can't seem to get sound over hdmi working again....it's really driving me nuts.

I followed cron0's instructions yesterday and they worked, but today they don't seem to work.

Does anyone have any idea how to fix this?

what's really strange is: I remember yesterday seeing an audio device called Nvidia-HDMI in xbmc but now i only see the normal stuff....but when i do aplay -l and -L i get this:

Code:
root@wonslung-zbox:~# aplay -l

**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****

card 0: Intel [HDA Intel], device 0: ALC888 Analog [ALC888 Analog]

  Subdevices: 1/1

  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0

card 0: Intel [HDA Intel], device 1: ALC888 Digital [ALC888 Digital]

  Subdevices: 1/1

  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0

card 1: NVidia [HDA NVidia], device 3: NVIDIA HDMI [NVIDIA HDMI]

  Subdevices: 1/1

  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0

root@wonslung-zbox:~# aplay -L

null

    Discard all samples (playback) or generate zero samples (capture)

front:CARD=Intel,DEV=0

    HDA Intel, ALC888 Analog

    Front speakers

surround40:CARD=Intel,DEV=0

    HDA Intel, ALC888 Analog

    4.0 Surround output to Front and Rear speakers

surround41:CARD=Intel,DEV=0

    HDA Intel, ALC888 Analog

    4.1 Surround output to Front, Rear and Subwoofer speakers

surround50:CARD=Intel,DEV=0

    HDA Intel, ALC888 Analog

    5.0 Surround output to Front, Center and Rear speakers

surround51:CARD=Intel,DEV=0

    HDA Intel, ALC888 Analog

    5.1 Surround output to Front, Center, Rear and Subwoofer speakers

surround71:CARD=Intel,DEV=0

    HDA Intel, ALC888 Analog

    7.1 Surround output to Front, Center, Side, Rear and Woofer speakers

iec958:CARD=Intel,DEV=0

    HDA Intel, ALC888 Digital

    IEC958 (S/PDIF) Digital Audio Output

hdmi:CARD=NVidia

    HDA NVidia, NVIDIA HDMI

    HDMI Audio Output

which is the same as yesterday i'm almost sure.

- wonslung - 2010-06-11

ok, more strangeness...

I'm still unable to get it working.....here is what is really strange....when i try to set the options to

options snd-hda-intel enable_msi=0 probe_mask=0xffff,0xfff2

it doesn't allow me to choose from the Nvidia-hdmi option in xbmc....

if i set the options to:

options snd-hda-intel enable_msi=0 index=-2

or

options snd-hda-intel enable_msi=0 index=1

it allows me to pick Nvidia HDMI but i still get no sound.....i no longer see the error message in xbmc about being unable to find the right sound device...

This is driving me nuts....

EDIT:

ok,this is really starting to piss me off.

I've reinstalled several times and tried about 100 things...what's really killing me is it worked once and i have no idea what i did differntly....

i'm really getting frustrated here

ok, i finially got it working....it was a total pain.

no matter what i did 1.0.23 would not work for me...what i ended up doing was:

downloading the script for 1.0.23 and editting it for these files:

Code:
PACKAGE=1.0.22

setpack () {

DRIVER=alsa-driver-1.0.22.1

FIRMWARE=alsa-firmware-1.0.20

LIB=alsa-lib-1.0.22

PLUGINS=alsa-plugins-1.0.22

UTILS=alsa-utils-1.0.22

TOOLS=alsa-tools-1.0.22

OSS=alsa-oss-1.0.17

}

installing with that, then getting the patch here:

http://forum.xbmc.org/showpost.php?p=502799&postcount=13

and reinstalling alsa-driver after patching it.

finally, i could get it working.

- matchsmalone - 2010-06-13

The other day I received my Zotac Zbox HD-ID11, and have been getting it set up with XBMC Live. Throughout the process, these forums have been invaluable, and I appreciate the help that everyone provides here.

Since this is perhaps the first box out there with next-gen ION and Atom D510, I figure that a lot of people will start picking them up soon. Now that I have everything (mostly) working, I thought I would compile all of the information that I used into one guide to help others like me.

Disclaimer: Just to be clear, I am not a Linux nor XBMC expert. I know just enough to really be dangerous. I take no responsibility for anything negative that happens as a result of these instructions. If any Linux gurus out there have any feedback or suggestions, I would be happy to update this accordingly.

Upgrading the BIOS:

Overall, this is an outstanding piece of hardware. The most popular complaint that I have seen people raise, is the fact that the fan blows too loud, and comes on too much. Thankfully, there is already a BIOS update that drastically improved that for me. Of course, updating the BIOS is serious business, so proceed with caution when executing these instructions. Caveat emptor if you will.

Download the latest BIOS version
Download the HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool
Download DOS-on-USB.

Extract all of these downloaded archives
Start up the HP tool.
Under "Device" choose your USB drive from the drop-down.
For "File System" select FAT32.
Check "Create a DOS startup disk."
Select the folder with the extracted DOS-on-USB files for "using system files located at"
Click Start.

Now you have a bootable dosk USB disk.
Next you need to copy the afudos.exe and A140PA20.rom (file name may be slightly different if you download a newer version since the time of this writing.)

Plug in the USB stick to the Zbox, and turn it on. Go into the BIOS by repeatedly pressing DEL when you see the Zotac banner. Make sure the USB has first boot priority.
The DOS-on-USB will try to prompt you to install DOS to the HDD. We don't need to do that, just hit Cancel or whatever you need to get out of that, and you should be returned to a DOS prompt (basically a blinking cursor in front of C:\)
Now enter the following:

Code:
AFUDOS A140PA20.ROM /B /P /N /X /C

Creating a USB disk image:

I did this using Windows, although there are other ways to do it.

First download the XBMC Live image and unetbootin.

Open unetbootin by clicking the exe.
Select the "disk image" radio button and ISO from the drop down menu. Then browse to the XBMC Live image.
At the bottom make sure "USB Drive" is selected, and select your USB drive from the drop down (this obviously assumes you have already plugged in your USB drive).
Click OK.

Installing XBMC Live using USB:

Insert the USB drive into one of the slots on the Zotac case, and turn it on.
If you have a new, blank/unformatted HDD installed it should just boot straight to the USB stick. However, to be sure you can go into the BIOS by mashing the DEL key when the Zotac logo comes up on the screen. In the BIOS, go to the Boot tab, and adjust the settings as necessary to make sure the USB drive has first boot priority.
When prompted, select the option to "Install to hard drive" and follow the instructions on the screen to install XBMC. Along the way, it will ask you to create a username and password, xbmc is commonly used for both.

Configuring networking:

The first thing I did was configure Wifi, as I unfortunately don't have a place for a wired connection in my room. Wired networking seemed to work out of the box for me.

The wireless card is an Atheros AR9285. Download the latest driver available here.

Assuming you don't have any networking options yet, you'll have to put this on a USB drive to get it onto your Zotac machine.
Insert the USB drive that contains the driver you downloaded into the machine. Press Ctrl-Alt-F1 to enter a command line interface. The USB drive should automatically mount, just look for it by entering:

Code:
cd /media

ls

From the output of ls you should see something like "removable disk," "external," etc. Navigate to it and copy the driver over (for me the driver file was called "compat-wireless-2.6.35.tar.bz2":

Code:
cd external

cp compat-wireless-2.6.35.tar.bz2 /home/xbmc

cd

Now that we have the driver file in our home directory we can unpack and install it (be patient, this will take a while):

Code:
tar -xf compat-wireless-2.6.35.tar.bz2

cd compat-wireless-2.6.35.tar.bz2

make

sudo make install

sudo make unload

sudo modprobe ath9k

Reboot.

Now we just need to add it to /etc/network/interfaces so that it starts up by default:

Code:
sudo nano /etc/network/interfaces

This should bring up a text file. If there is a line in it that says "auto eth0" you'll need to add a # sign in front of it.

Add the following to the file, obviously, replacing the relevant values with your own:

Code:
auto wlan0

iface wlan0 inet dhcp

wireless-essid yournetworkname

wireless-key yournetworkkey

wireless-channel 11

wireless-mode managed

Now just enter this:

Code:
/etc/init.d/networking restart

And Wifi should be up and running. To verify though, type "ifconfig" and make sure you have an ip address. Also try pinging google.com to make sure you can access the internet.

Code:
ping google.com -c 4

Install NVIDIA Proprietary Drivers and Update Alsa for Audio Over HDMI:

Cr0nos' instructions worked like a charm for me. Just follow them to the letter.
Note that I tried the instructions for this on Anandtech as well as the instructions on Zotac's website. Both were already out of date when I tried them, cr0nos' instructions worked great, no patching required.

Hiding the Mouse Cursor:

I had the annoying issue of having the mouse cursor sitting in the middle of the screen, and it would never go away. I think there are a number of ways to fix this known issue, but for me it was simple enough to do the following:
Add this line under the Device section of /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Code:
Option "HWCursor" "false"

Suspend/Wake issues:

Here I'm stuck. I can suspend to RAM without any issues, and when I press the power button it will wake. However, I am having two issues:
1. When waking, I lose network capability, and no IP address. I have to reboot or /etc/init.d/networking restart.
2. I cannot wake with the IR remote. The IR receiver usually flashes when it receives a signal, but I get no red flashes during suspend.

I've tried going through the steps on the wiki, I've tried adding SUSPEND_MODULES=ath9k to /etc/pm/config.d/madwifi as described here, and I've gone through this guide, with no luck.

If anybody has any troubleshooting suggestions, I'd be happy to update this.

Audio Over HDMI Extremely Finnicky - matchsmalone - 2010-06-13

Since going through all of the steps above, I have run into a few more problems. I had everything working and was using a Samba share to stream everything over Wifi, but of course HD content would sometimes stutter. So, I decided to move everything onto an external drive, and hook that up.

Well, after doing some exploring to get the external, USB NTFS drive to mount (basically installing ntfs-config, and removing nodiskmount from menu.lst) I had no sound. In the Audio settings, I didn't even have HDA NVIDIA HDMI available anymore.

So I went digging through config files to see if anything had changed. I still saw the NVIDIA card in aplay -l and -L, the speaker test worked fine, but no audio in XBMC. Also, my available setting in audio would change almost everytime I rebooted. Sometimes I'd see HDA NVIDIA Default, sometimes just hdmi, sometimes not.

Finally, I began to wonder if the external drive had anything to do with it, so I removed it. Suddenly, audio started working (at first anyway). After eventually turning it off, audio was no longer working again next time I tried. A few reboots later it randomly came back. I didn't change any settings at all, no configuration modifications. I would just rebooted, look in the Audio setting to see if HDA NVIDIA HDMI was available as an option, and try playing a song to verify. Repeating this multiple times it would sometimes just work. Right now it's working, so I'm basically just leaving it on so I have to mess with it less.

Anybody have any idea on what could cause it to spontaneously change like this? I've checked to see if the card/device numbers get assigned differently when I reboot, but they seem to be the same.

I do not understand this at all!

EDIT: One more thing. I thought maybe the ntfs driver could be mucking things up somehow, so I tried to sudo apt-get remove --purge ntfs-config, and had the same results. The one thing that is consistent is that audio will not work if I start up the machine with an external USB NTFS drive plugged in. It will sometimes work if I first boot without the drive, and then plug in the USB after it's up and running and the sound is already working.

some questions - madoe - 2010-06-20

i'm still in two minds about how to act. Whether to buy the zbox hd-id11 or to wait for another media pc to come out (like the fanless shuttle xs35).

I still have some questions:

Does the box play back any 1080p video codec xbmc supports without problems or are there restrictions?

Can someone, who has updated the bios, tell us if the fan is still producing so much noise when playing 1080p videos or does it stay off (since the gpu is decoding it)?

thanks

- matchsmalone - 2010-06-20

madoe Wrote:Does the box play back any 1080p video codec xbmc supports without problems or are there restrictions?

Can someone, who has updated the bios, tell us if the fan is still producing so much noise when playing 1080p videos or does it stay off (since the gpu is decoding it)?

thanks

All 1080p content that I have tried is smooth as silk. No issues whatsoever.

The fan still runs when playing 1080p videos, but it is pretty quiet. Prior to the BIOS update, the fan seemed to run at full speed all the time, however it is significantly quieter now, and not an issue for me at all.

It works but volume is very low - wienke - 2010-06-23

Followed the steps of cron0 and matchmalones and everything works great. Thanks a lot. If I had the knowledge to help with the suspend and wake up issues I would have.

I only have a few questions left:

- how can I make the analog audio to work? (the green plug in front of the zbox)
- the volume level through HDMI is very very low. How can I increase the volume of the zbox?

- hydog - 2010-06-23

wienke Wrote:Followed the steps of cron0 and matchmalones and everything works great. Thanks a lot. If I had the knowledge to help with the suspend and wake up issues I would have.

I only have a few questions left:

- how can I make the analog audio to work? (the green plug in front of the zbox)
- the volume level through HDMI is very very low. How can I increase the volume of the zbox?

If you are using XBMC Live 9.11 CD - audio from the front panel jack worked out of the box for me...
I will have to test it and see if it still works since i upgraded my Alsa drivers and got that working. I was so excited HDMI audio worked - i didn't care about the jack any more... Laugh

For the audio level -- you should be able to increase the XBMC audio level. Mine at default XBMC lvel is plenty loud -- i have my TV only turned up to 10-12..
Or maybe look at the alsamixer app in a shell command to see what the levels are?

Thanks for helping out a newbee - wienke - 2010-06-24

Thanks for helping out a newbee. That did the trick!

- jvdb - 2010-06-24

matchsmalone Wrote:All 1080p content that I have tried is smooth as silk. No issues whatsoever.

The fan still runs when playing 1080p videos, but it is pretty quiet. Prior to the BIOS update, the fan seemed to run at full speed all the time, however it is significantly quieter now, and not an issue for me at all.

I can second this. My first HD-ID11 had overheating problems but the replacement has worked flawlessly. Fan is very quiet with the BIOS update. Much more quiet than my projector and subwoofer amp fans.

I have yet to find a 1080p video it doesn't play perfectly.

cr0n's instructions - k3wf3w - 2010-06-25

I think something has changed that makes cr0n's instructions not work any more.
When cr0n did an aplay -l and -L he got back

Code:
root@wonslung-zbox:~# aplay -l

**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****

card 0: Intel [HDA Intel], device 0: ALC888 Analog [ALC888 Analog]

  Subdevices: 1/1

  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0

card 0: Intel [HDA Intel], device 1: ALC888 Digital [ALC888 Digital]

  Subdevices: 1/1

  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0

card 1: NVidia [HDA NVidia], device 3: NVIDIA HDMI [NVIDIA HDMI]

  Subdevices: [color=red]0/1[/color]

  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0

root@wonslung-zbox:~# aplay -L

null

    Discard all samples (playback) or generate zero samples (capture)

front:CARD=Intel,DEV=0

    HDA Intel, ALC888 Analog

    Front speakers

surround40:CARD=Intel,DEV=0

    HDA Intel, ALC888 Analog

    4.0 Surround output to Front and Rear speakers

surround41:CARD=Intel,DEV=0

    HDA Intel, ALC888 Analog

    4.1 Surround output to Front, Rear and Subwoofer speakers

surround50:CARD=Intel,DEV=0

    HDA Intel, ALC888 Analog

    5.0 Surround output to Front, Center and Rear speakers

surround51:CARD=Intel,DEV=0

    HDA Intel, ALC888 Analog

    5.1 Surround output to Front, Center, Rear and Subwoofer speakers

surround71:CARD=Intel,DEV=0

    HDA Intel, ALC888 Analog

    7.1 Surround output to Front, Center, Side, Rear and Woofer speakers

iec958:CARD=Intel,DEV=0

    HDA Intel, ALC888 Digital

    IEC958 (S/PDIF) Digital Audio Output

hdmi:CARD=NVidia

    HDA NVidia, NVIDIA HDMI

    HDMI Audio Output

but when wonslung and I do it we get back

Code:
root@wonslung-zbox:~# aplay -l

**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****

card 0: Intel [HDA Intel], device 0: ALC888 Analog [ALC888 Analog]

  Subdevices: 1/1

  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0

card 0: Intel [HDA Intel], device 1: ALC888 Digital [ALC888 Digital]

  Subdevices: 1/1

  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0

card 1: NVidia [HDA NVidia], device 3: NVIDIA HDMI [NVIDIA HDMI]

  Subdevices: [color=red]1/1[/color]

  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0

root@wonslung-zbox:~# aplay -L

null

    Discard all samples (playback) or generate zero samples (capture)

front:CARD=Intel,DEV=0

    HDA Intel, ALC888 Analog

    Front speakers

surround40:CARD=Intel,DEV=0

    HDA Intel, ALC888 Analog

    4.0 Surround output to Front and Rear speakers

surround41:CARD=Intel,DEV=0

    HDA Intel, ALC888 Analog

    4.1 Surround output to Front, Rear and Subwoofer speakers

surround50:CARD=Intel,DEV=0

    HDA Intel, ALC888 Analog

    5.0 Surround output to Front, Center and Rear speakers

surround51:CARD=Intel,DEV=0

    HDA Intel, ALC888 Analog

    5.1 Surround output to Front, Center, Rear and Subwoofer speakers

surround71:CARD=Intel,DEV=0

    HDA Intel, ALC888 Analog

    7.1 Surround output to Front, Center, Side, Rear and Woofer speakers

iec958:CARD=Intel,DEV=0

    HDA Intel, ALC888 Digital

    IEC958 (S/PDIF) Digital Audio Output

hdmi:CARD=NVidia

    HDA NVidia, NVIDIA HDMI

    HDMI Audio Output

Would this be an indication as to why it isn't working for us?