Posts: 26
Joined: Apr 2010
Reputation:
0
JRock
Junior Member
Posts: 26
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?
Posts: 138
Joined: Feb 2009
Reputation:
0
wiz561
Senior Member
Posts: 138
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.
Posts: 16
Joined: Dec 2008
Reputation:
0
2010-09-22, 08:31
(This post was last modified: 2010-09-22, 08:37 by VCDmonger.)
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.
Posts: 362
Joined: Jan 2008
Reputation:
2
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.
Odroid C2 running CoreElec
Posts: 138
Joined: Feb 2009
Reputation:
0
wiz561
Senior Member
Posts: 138
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.
Posts: 237
Joined: Dec 2008
Reputation:
13
2010-09-28, 04:39
(This post was last modified: 2010-09-28, 04:50 by angrycamel.)
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?
Posts: 138
Joined: Feb 2009
Reputation:
0
wiz561
Senior Member
Posts: 138
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!