[wiz561]

Hi,

I'm running xbmc off an big, old Athlon box for a few years now. Love the xbmc and how it all works, don't love the big case. There's a few requirements I have...

- Integrate with Harmony 880 remote
- Push audio and video over HDMI
- wired net connection
- Small form factor
- Quiet-ish. I know many complain about the noise from the Zotac's, but the AMD Athlon PC box I have with the PSU fan, an additional large external fan on the case, and fans on the CPU and graphics card don't bother me.
- Be able to watch up to 1080p mkv's on it without it gagging.
- As I get older, I'm getting tired of tinkering around with things and just want things to 'work'. I've been running the devel version of xbmc...which works fine, but it would be nice to just load something up (xbmclive/xbmcfreak distro) and just forget about it.

I've been doing a LOT of research lately, and I keep hitting a brick wall. Many people say the Shuttle XS35 box is the way to go. Well, it is nice, but it's a little above what I want to pay for a machine.

Other's love the Acer Revo machines. It seems like these are pretty popular, but are slowly being replaced by

And it appears that many people have had good experiences with the Zotac machines. At first, Zotac's made a lot of sense. But it seems like recently, they keep adding more and more products and configurations, but not explaining the differences between them.

So, I've had my eye on this...

MAG MAGHD-ND01-U Dual-Core All-in-One Barebone System With Intel Atom 330 Dual Core Processor, 2GB DDR2-800 RAM, 160GB SATA Hard Drive, Integrated NVidia ION Graphics Processor, Operating System Not Included

It's going for 299 at MicroCenter now and ~275 on amazon. Before I take the plunge on this box, I was wondering if anybody has had any success stories (or horror) with it, if there are any "how-to" guides to get around the annoying parts (IE: audio over hdmi), and what your general thoughts are about it.

Thanks in advance...

[wiz561]

...or, should I get an id11? I'm basically looking at what is easier and less fuss to get up and running.

[wiz561]

Well, I have some money to burn so I ended up getting the id11. The biggest decision maker was I couldn't find much about the nd01, there's 13 pages of posts relating to the id11, and xbmcfreak did a writeup on it.

So, it looks like people ARE using the id11...so it (hopefully) has good support and will work without many headaches.

[infinityteg]

please report back with how you get on. im looking at these two options

thanks
steve

[wiz561]

OK, here's some info about them all. As you already know, I went with the id11. I picked it up at Fry's. I'm not fond of Fry's, but it's nice to have such a wide selection. Just hope you don't ever have to take anything back. But that's another story.

Here's what I ended up purchasing...

WESTERN DIGITAL 120GB SERIAL ATA/300 5400RPM 8MB BUFFER NOTEBOOK HARD DRIVE - WD1200BEVT

2GB DDR2 PC5300 SO-DIMM / 200-PIN (single) / CORSAIR / VS2GSDS667D2

ZOTAC ZBOX ZBOXHD-ID11-U Intel Atom D510 1.66 GHz Dual Core All-in-One Mini-PC Barebone

SIIG Vista MCE Remote Controller (CE-000022-S1)

Now, you can go without the MCE Remote Controller and the HD, but I wanted something I can function with.

-----------

Put everything together, flashed BIOS to latest using unetbootin and freedos, and set the sata HD in the BIOS to "ahci" instead of IDE.

After that, I downloaded 'xbmcfreak-10.00-svn33324.zip' because I've heard it was the easiest. Took the ISO, mounted it on an ubuntu box, and formated the usb drive as fat32. Mounted the iso, copied the contents minus the '/boot' directory, and ran a grub-install. It gets hazy, but there's a few howto's on how to do this. You can use unetbootin, but I found that it didn't use grub so the only option was to install. Maybe it's just my anal-retentive self, but I felt like I was loosing something if I didn't ge tthe full look and feel of the CDRom.

The one problem I did run into was that during the install, after you choose your language, it popped up with a "Load CD-Rom Driver". Well, it's a usb, not a cdrom. After about an hour of trying to figure it out, someone posted up on ubuntuforums a solution that worked for me.

<copy xbmcfreak svn iso to the thumb drive.>

mkdir /mnt/usb /mnt/iso
mount –t vfat /dev/<usb drive partition device file> /mnt/usb
mount –t iso9660 –o loop /mnt/usb/<iso file> /mnt/iso

ALT-F1 to return to installation dialog and answer as follows:
Load CD-ROM driver from removable media? <No>
Manually select CD-ROM module and device> <Yes>
Module needed for accessing the CD-ROM: none
Device file for accessing the CD-ROM: /dev/loop0

Make sure you follow the directions or else it may not work for you. After all this, I got it to install just fine.

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After everythign installed, I didn't have audio over HDMI. A search came up with this...

http://www.xbmcfreak.nl/en/english-zotac...d11-sound/

I added the 'options' at the end of alsa-base.conf file,r ebooted, and everything worked!

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Now the remote. To my surprise, the remote worked out of the box in xbmc. I was absolutely shocked. I spent hours upon hours getting my PVR-150 remote to work with mythtv years ago. Now, I just plugged hte remote into the front and away I went.

To get the 'suspend' to work, go into the BIOS and enable the 's3' one and make sure you enable the post video option too. I don't know why, I did it after I read it on a forum and it worked.

The other trick to getting the remote to wake the box back up is to enable it in some file. Read this file...

$ cat /proc/acpi/wakeup

You'll see a few columns with "USB0", "USB1", "USB2", etc. Type the following in...

$ echo "USB0" > /proc/acpi/wakeup

Then do "USB1", "USB2", etc, until the /proc/acpi/wakeup file has enabled for all USB devices. You can also put this in /etc/rc.local so it will be there when you reboot again. After the xbmc goes to 'suspend', you can wake it up by hitting the power button on the remote.

-------

As far as the box goes, I haven't had much time to test it out tonight. Setting it up and everything so far, I have to say that I'm OK with it. Nothing about it makes me regret it, but yet nothing about it yet makes me say 'go buy it now'. I'm a little leery about how it will handle 1080p mkv's. I threw the attached mkv at it...well, not attached, but output from mkvinfo to give you an idea of what I was dealing with...

<i had to cut the mkvinfo text out because the forums said my message was too long. The filename was something like ...2010 1080p BluRay x264.mkv and it was about 13g. sorry. >

It seemed to play well, but I only had it on for about 5 minutes and then I had to run. I also had this mounted over a samba share because it's still on my old xbmc box.

I'll be able to get a better feel for it over the next couple of days and hope to be able to tell you to go buy this now. I suppose that at $229.00 for the board, processor, and case aren't that bad. If you were to buy the bare-bones (without the case), you will spend about that much. You need hte memory for it and the HD is nice, so for a small amount of money, you can probably do a lot with it. But again, I will give it more tests this weekend and see what happens.

I know I shortened a lot of the instructions here, but I don't know what your level of expertise is. If you need me to explain something more in depth, please let me know. I hope that this helps some people out!!!

[infinityteg]

wow thanks for that. i wasnt really expecting that much of a response.
that'll make it a whole lot easier. i have all parts excet for the acutual pc.
I have the parts in a old case with mini itx at the mo but just doesnt cut it with the BD rips
(no graphics card).


cheers
steve

[wiz561]

No problem. I might also post this in the zbox id11 thread here because it might help people.

I use to be really into the mythtv scene years ago, and one thing I loved is people used the wiki a lot. In xbmc land, one of the things that is a little frustrating is that the wiki can be updated a little. This may push me to just do that...

As I go and add things, or if you go through it, feel free to ask. If you have to upgrade the video card, I'd just get the zotac box. About two years ago, I was trying to play a blue-ray rip and my box kept gagging. I spent about 100 to 150 bucks for a new video card that did VDPAU. Looking back, for a couple of bucks more, I could have gotten a whole new system. So, just keep that in mind before you buy a new video card.

[wiz561]

FYI, I started a wiki page up about it. I'm going to try to get it done tonight or tomorrow, but time will tell...

http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=HOW...BOXHD-ID11