The box itself is well made. RAM was really easy to install. The case has small thumb screws for easy access without tools. There is a small stand and a mounting bracket for attaching to the back of an LCD. Plenty of USB ports! So far I'm really pleased with my decision to get this model. I chose it for the ION GPU since the media center applications I use will take advantage of it, leaving the CPU mostly untouched.
I also have an older Atom 330/Nvidia ION that I use upstairs as a MythTV DVR, which works great. I record over-the-air HD channels with an antenna, but my 60" DLP downstairs in the den can't pick up the OTA channels that well. I also wanted to be able to stream DVR recordings on the larger screen in my den, and the Zotac Zbox fit the bill! I wanted to keep costs down, so I got 4GB of Corsair RAM and originally I planned to install OpenELEC/XBMC on a 16GB SDHC class 6 card, but I found it a little limiting. OpenELEC was really easy to install using a USB thumb drive and unetbootin, and boot time was *quick*, maybe 8 seconds or so. I soon figured out that I couldn't use it to stream live TV from my DVR upstairs with XBMC though :-( I may have been able to hack it together and get it working with add-ons, but I just didn't want to spend the time on it.
Since I couldn't easily get Live TV with OpenELEC, I installed MythBuntu instead. Initial boot isn't as fast, and it's not optimized for Atom/ION like OpenELEC is, but it still runs well, and I'm just suspending or hibernating when not in use, so it's back up pretty fast when I want to use it. It runs fairly well from the SDHC card. Not sure what the longevity of the card will be. I probably shouldn't, but I have swap turned on. Hopefully with 4GB of ram, the swap won't be used that often. Will have to wait and see! I'm planning to make a backup ISO of the card so if it dies, I can easily get it back up and running with a new card. I had to add one line to /etc/pulse/default.pa ( load-module module-alsa-sink device=hw:1,7 ) to get audio working over HDMI, and then set MythTV's frontend to use that output as well. Works great! Although, since changing the OS is as easy as putting in another SD card and rebooting, I may play around with some other media center distros as well!
To control it from my couch, I added a bluetooth keyboard/trackpad. I couldn't find any configuration options with the base MythBuntu install, so I added Gnome in the MythBuntu Control Center. Probably overkill, but that gave me an easy gui to setup bluetooth devices and all the gnome desktop software if I decide to use it later. I also had to go into the display settings and change the overscan to fit the desktop on my DLP. For an LCD, Plasma, etc. you won't have that problem, but for the DLP it was easy to fix. I also had to calibrate the Myth Frontend using the screen setup to fit the DLP screen.
This box easily plays anything I've thrown at it so far with the Nvidia VDPAU GPU acceleration option on. Both MythTV and XBMC will use VDPAU. Other programs like VLC or MPlayer may or may not yet, so videos might stutter.
In summary, I like it and would recommend it to anyone building a low power Linux Media Center :-)
Customers also viewed these products
Page 1 of 1 Start overPage 1 of 1
