[sakuraki]

Hi,

Just bought the RL70 pre-installed with windows 8 to replace my Acer Revo R3700 (on win 7) . I am having problem with the digital audio with XBMC.

Whenever I play the HD movies, I will get the message failed to initialized audio. I only able to get the audio when I switch to Analog. Tried many versions of xmbc still the same. I also tried to select all the available audio output device, none works. But my previous acer was working fine though

My setup RL70 > Pioneer VSX920 > HDTV

Is it because of Windows 8 problem? Any advice?

[Jogee]

Is your receiver on before you start up xbmc?

[lazyboy0172]

how well is windows 8 running on your rl70? I got one a couple months ago and just updated it to Win8 with microsofts special $15 upgrade pricing but the computer has become useless. It's cpu is running at 99% constantly and task manager says the culprit is 'system' so it's nothing I can control and it brings the rest of the system to a crawl; I definitely cant do anything in xbmc. I have no idea what is causing it but googling doesn't come up with much so I cant tell if its common or not. How is yours running?

[potnoodles]

how well is windows 8 running on your rl70? I got one a couple months ago and just updated it to Win8 with microsofts special $15 upgrade pricing but the computer has become useless. It's cpu is running at 99% constantly and task manager says the culprit is 'system' so it's nothing I can control and it brings the rest of the system to a crawl; I definitely cant do anything in xbmc. I have no idea what is causing it but googling doesn't come up with much so I cant tell if its common or not. How is yours running?

On my RL70 I have win8 (£14.99 upgrade in the uk) installed alongside win7. I run a single xbmc portably from a seperate partition, as well as other portable apps used by both OSes.
When I installed win8 I didnt do the BIOS update for win8. After installing win8, I did install all of the drivers from the Acer site for win 7 64 - all that win8 would accept (1 or 2 win8 drivers were newer).
Win8 runs snappier than the original win7 on my RL70. Portable xbmc is working fine from both OSes.

One thing I have noticed - using a login that bypasses the windows explorer shell and launches xbmc as custom windows shell - cpu usage jumps up and down like a yo-yo.(both OSes).
Xbmc still works perfectly despite this.
Using a normal login and launching xbmc from windows the cpu usage settles around 23%when nothing playing, around 30% playing 1080pand hardly ever gets higher than 40% .
My RL70 came with 3Gb win7 64 home premium 320Gb drive - no optical..It still has the original os.
In the BIOS I changed the Max Frame Buffer to 512mb(maximum) but this was for 1080p playback in Openelec - xbmc in windows worked happily with this set to auto.
I upgraded ram to 8gb.and although I dont think that made a significant difference, it didnt do any harm.
Video is output to hdmi to 1080p plasma @60hz audio output is optical to reciever.

Before Iinstalling win8 I deleted the DATA partition(which was a 4th Primary partition) and shrank the C:Acer partition to 80Gb.This allowed me to create an extended partion for win 8 (80Gb) and the remainder of the drive is another partition for shared files/folders/portable apps etc..

[lazyboy0172]

thanks for the reply, after playing around with it some more last night I went in and installed all the drivers from acer, and that solved the cpu problem. Specifically, it was the audio driver that was causing so much slowdown. I installed the video driver from amd and saw it included hdmi audio in that which is what I use so I didn't bother with the original driver at first. However, there is still a small issue with audio. I set it to hdmi and digital in xbmc and all that works great, but emulators are broken completely. Audio repeats and stutters and gameplay is stuck at crawl while it tries to keep up, and I'm not sure why that is or what I can do. BioShock has the issue as well and won't even play audio in game or let me change that setting, but other games on steam such as Portal and Super Meat Boy were fine. In device manager under sound controllers I have AMD hgh definition audio device and realtek high definition audio. Under playback devices I have AMD HDMI Output set as default and configured as 5.1 speakers, speakers is enabled but not plugged in, and realtek digital output is enabled and 'ready' but I'm not using it for anything. music from slacker and xbox music plays fine as well; it seems limited to any emulator I've tried and Bioshock but more games may be affected that I haven't tried yet. Any ideas on what I can do? Does everything run smoothly for you, and what drivers do you have for you audio devices if so?

[potnoodles]

Windows is set to use realtek digital out as default. Xbmc is set to use realtek directsound. My output is optical to receiver. Never had any problems.

[zimbo_ouen]

******** THIS IS NOT THE FIX NOW - SEE NEXT POST BELOW **********

Rather late to the party I know but this might help...

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I have resolved the issue and audio works fine now in Windows 8.1!

The Acer Revo RL70 comes in two flavours - one with Linux and one with Windows and it seems they each have their own BIOS!
The original spec of mine was : Acer Aspire Revo RL70 Nettop, AMD E450 1.65GHz, 4GB RAM, 750GB HDD, Blu-Ray, Wifi, Wireless Kbd+Mse, Linux

I was on a BIOS for Linux.

The procedure I did was download the following BIOS files from:
http://www.acer.co.uk/ac/en/GB/content/drivers

Find the Revo RL70 and click BIOS.

You will see 4 options. I downloaded the two:
BIOS Acer BIOS for Linux P01.A1L 2.6 MB 2012/08/31 Download
BIOS Acer BIOS P01.A2 3.6 MB 2012/02/13 Download
I think you'd be ok with just updating straight away to the PO1.A2 but I did the PO1.A1L first and then the PO1.A2.

Only after flashing to PO1.A2 did I suddenly get sound working (I had already installed the official RL 70 Drivers for audio and video)

I got so frustrated with this so thought I'd share to save someone else the hassle!

[zimbo_ouen]

Hi again all,

I think it was pure coincidence that it happened to work after the BIOS update as I thought I'd wipe the PC drive and start again to make sure and it didn't work again!

I gave up and bough and Android Stick but it's pathetic in trying to play high def MKVs and some streaming etc so thought I'd have another look...

I have now worked out it's def a driver conflict between what appears to be Microsoft's standard driver for audio (that comes with Windows 8 via online driver collection) and realtek or amd drivers (when you try to install either of them).

I had noticed no matter which driver I installed it would always show "High Definition Audio Bus" with an exclamtion mark and it was driving me crazy as couldn't get HDMI to be recognised for audio - only video (ie extend or mirror displays worked fine).

I finally had a eureka moment this weekend and started a new install of Windows 8.1 BUT this is what I did:
1. I disabled the onboard sound via the BIOS
2. I went through the windows setup but on setup I chose customize settings rather than express settings - in here you need to ensure (for now) that it won't try and find/download and install drivers via windows update so turn this off for now
3. Now when I finished the rest of the setup and got into Windows I simply downloaded the realtek AMD driver from: http://www.realtek.com.tw/downloads/down...Down=false
Select "ATI HDMI Audio Device" (2.70) and run and install this.
4. Restart your PC and you will have the HDMI audio working now. I tested this with the AMD Catalyst Drivers too and it did work ok too but I'd read in a few places it was better to use the Realtek driver as it was better(?).

I have tested and DTS and Dolby Digital definitely work fine (all my amp can support - it's old!).

Anyways it is all working fine and I know if I ever need to rebuild or anything that I can confidently get it working fine.

I thought I'd share this updated and 100% working fix as I apologise the last one I advised below didn't work and I'm not sure how to remove/edit that post.