[medicineuk]

I thought it was about time that we put together a thread to discuss any problems that people are having with the ASRock IONSTAR and XBMC Linux. This has been discussed in bits and bobs around this forum but we should really have this information in one central place.

If you are having issues or know of any brilliant solutions please share

Issues that we need help with

* S/PDIF Digital In - At the moment I have Digital in working but the connection between my IONSTAR and AMP seems to be constantly opening and closing. Basically after any audio starts playing it takes about one-two second before I can hear it from my speakers. This isn't a massive problem but it does mean that I can not hear any menu navigation sounds as the're shorter then the 1 second needed for the AMP register audio. This is a problem with either the drivers or the OS because this didn't happen in windows 7.

Solutions

* Update XBMC Live 9.04.01 Nvidia driver - thanks l.capriotti

Get hold of some ISO editing software (on Windows use MagicISO)

Download the newer Nvidia driver package from here.

Load the XBMC Live 9.04.01 ISO into your ISO editor and replace the restrictedDrivers.nvidia.img with the one you downloaded.

Save the ISO to a new file and burn to CD.

When you install XBMC Live you will have the newer driver installed.

Alternatively extract XBMC Live iso to USB drive then replace nvidia driver with newer version and boot from USB drive to install (didn't work for me though maybe down to software issue on my end)

Tested on my unit and it now reads Ion GPU instead of unknown.

medicineuk - could you alter your first post to link to this one perhaps.

* Enable 1080p @ 24Hz for XBMC Live

Thanks to boba23 for the solution
If you have limited linux experience I suggest downloading Ubuntu CD and boot from it. It will give you the option to boot a “live” version called try without changing… so go with that.

Once Ubuntu is up & running click Places and look for a hard drive there should be two listed and one is about 4GB in size so click on that one so it mounts it, now close the file browser window it opened.

Now start terminal found under Applications->Accessories

Type in what’s below and it should open a new file browser window
gksudo nautilus

Browse to /etc/x11 folder and look for xorg.conf and open it in the text editor

Look through the file and you will see a section called Screen, add the following line into this section with quotes intact,

Option "DynamicTwinView" "false"

Click save if all goes well it should, if it won’t let you close the window and repeat the terminal step.

Now boot back into XBMC Live & go to settings->video->player and enable "adjust refresh rate". Now to to settings->appearance->screen and change resolution to 1920x1080@24Hz

To confirm its working you can press z on keyboard and it will display refresh rate.