Zotac Ion board works great with hdmi sound

[rperre]

Hey all,

Just wanted to post my experience with the Zotac ION board as an MD.

I'm running a Zotac IONITX-C-U with the brick 90W PSU and 1Gb of memory.
As a case i used the M350, which can be mounted on the wall or on the vesa mounts of the monitor. Nice little case.

My Core is an old A7N8X deluxe board on which i added a gigabit nic. I installed the June 1, 2010 snapshot on the core as a fresh start. This also went very smooth.

PXE boot as advertised, just set the BIOS options where they need to be, look in the ZOTAC ION Wiki.

After boot in my case i got a black screen and had to press 3 (and wait) to get the AVwizard to show, after this i selected hdmi2 with 1080p on 1 MD and hdmi2 with 720p on the second.

MD 1 is connected to a 47" Philips LCD (1080p max resolution)
MD 2 is connected to a 65" Hitachi DLP (1080i max resolution) connected to a Onkyo TX-SR606 Receiver

For the sound i selected hdmi and went to tty2 (CTRL-ALT-F2) and made sure that all alsamixer channels were unmuted and the volume up. I instantly had sound through hdmi, i even got the 2 "advanced" sound options.

After it all installed and the orbiter was generated i had to reboot the md to make the onscreen orbiter show up.

Now everything worked as you expect, except a few items i had to install.

1st the Medibuntu key is not installed, so doing an apt-get update will complain, just run

Code: [Select]

wget http://packages.medibuntu.org/medibuntu-key.gpg && sudo apt-key add medibuntu-key.gpg && rm medibuntu-key.gpg
2nd the libdvdcss2 package is not installed and (some) ripped dvd's will not play, just run

Code: [Select]

apt-get install libdvdcss2
mp3's played fine, but other codecs might be needed.

Overall i had a "works OOTB" experience and it's great to see it work like that.

Thanks to all who worked on this,

Richard

my setup

[golgoj4]

thanks for taking the time to document all this stuff for others to use as a reference.
-golgoj4

[nite_man]

After boot in my case i got a black screen and had to press 3 (and wait) to get the AVwizard to show, after this i selected hdmi2 with 1080p on 1 MD and hdmi2 with 720p on the second.

Can you explain why you chose hdmi2 and not hdmi1?

And also why you pressed 3? As I know HDMI/DVI is 1 - 1=DVI/HDMI, 2=VGA, 3=Component, 4=Composite, 5=S-Video.

[totallymaxed]

After boot in my case i got a black screen and had to press 3 (and wait) to get the AVwizard to show, after this i selected hdmi2 with 1080p on 1 MD and hdmi2 with 720p on the second.

Can you explain why you chose hdmi2 and not hdmi1?

And also why you pressed 3? As I know HDMI/DVI is 1 - 1=DVI/HDMI, 2=VGA, 3=Component, 4=Composite, 5=S-Video.

He selected HDMI2 because the Zotac's HDMI connector is numbered 2 and the DVI connector is numbered 1 (to all intents an purposes HDMI & DVI-D are the same). If he is using our updated AVwizard then pressing key '1' selects HDMI1 and pressing 'Q' selects HDMI2.

All the best


Andrew

[nite_man]

Thanks, Andrew, for clarification. Another question. What about Zotac graphical cards. Do they have the same - DVI is 1 and HDMI is 2? And does somebody update AVWizard shortcuts according to the latest changes?

[rperre]

nite-man, i honestly haven't tried the other option, i just know "3" works to get to the AVwizard screen.

And it does come up with component selected at that point, i just change it to hdmi2 since i knew that worked with this board. again other options..... haven't tried them.

Overall though, this is a nice setup for an MD, it works great, i have to get some real 1080p videos and see how it all comes together. Right now i can have 2 MD's play different movies and the core play a movie without hickups, but.... not 1080p (just don't have any movies with that resolution to try it yet)

Richard

[Marie.O]

Get yourself Big Buck Bunny and Elephant Dreams.

[totallymaxed]

nite-man, i honestly haven't tried the other option, i just know "3" works to get to the AVwizard screen.

And it does come up with component selected at that point, i just change it to hdmi2 since i knew that worked with this board. again other options..... haven't tried them.

Overall though, this is a nice setup for an MD, it works great, i have to get some real 1080p videos and see how it all comes together. Right now i can have 2 MD's play different movies and the core play a movie without hickups, but.... not 1080p (just don't have any movies with that resolution to try it yet)

Richard

If you rip a standard DVD to your system and then access it/play it from your Zotac based MD that has been setup at 1080P then the Zotac will upscale the video to 1080P....simple as that really.

All the best

Andrew

[theteju]

This post is highly appreciated.

Thank you very much.

[totallymaxed]

Thanks, Andrew, for clarification. Another question. What about Zotac graphical cards. Do they have the same - DVI is 1 and HDMI is 2? And does somebody update AVWizard shortcuts according to the latest changes?

Yes from memory I believe that Zotac graphics cards have the same video port numbering. As far as I know our updated AVWizard has been in the svn for ages so it should be available in 0810.

All the best


Andrew

[rperre]

I just read my own post and noticed that i wrote you had to reboot the core, this is not true, i had to reboot the md itself to make the orbiter show up. I updated the first post to reflect this.

Also wait, untill everything is installed before trying things, rebooting and/or installing libdvdcss2 etc... patience is a virtue.....

It works great, my son watch a movie the other day (i finally released it to my family and he said he loved it and it looked great.

Have fun,

Richard

[Marie.O]

Richard,

what was the sum we agreed upon to give to you for writing this very favorable success story?

Thank you.

[rperre]

Hey, if it works right, everybody should know.

I'll contact you about the sum   

Seriously, i have been trying my setup for a while now, and this was truly the easiest setup i did, thank you very much to everybody that contributed, i appreciate it.

Richard

[tkmedia]

Yes we have had great success the testing on the Zotac IONS.

We use them in our Z-series and are very happy with them.
The Z2 is totally quiet (fan less ) but properly cooled by its heat sink case.
The Z1 uses tri speed fans for cool quiet operation.
See link in signature


P.S.
We have found setting the video memory to 512mb provides the best and smoothest picture.

Tim