Another promising HD300 Replacement

[wayner]

Can it run Plex Media Server and serve up files to other Plex clients? This could work well as my car media server.

[JerryB]

Please excuse what is probably a dumb question but how do you control the device, e.g. install 3rd party software, select shows to watch, rewind, fast foward, etc.?

[Skirge01]

Originally Posted by jchiso

Get one.

It plays 1080p and 1080i flawlessly.

Just to be clear, you're still talking about either streamed 1080p or recorded 1080p, not Blu-rays, correct? I'm still wondering whether the unit can actually play original Blu-ray content. If not, then it's a no-go for me. If it can, I'll be picking one up for sure and seeing if it can do 3D (not hopeful on that last one ).

[wayner]

Originally Posted by JerryB

Please excuse what is probably a dumb question but how do you control the device, e.g. install 3rd party software, select shows to watch, rewind, fast foward, etc.?

this would be the same as any PC based client - you would need an IR receiver and use a remote control. You could also use the web based remote control from your smartphone but that can be a bit cumbersome.

[jchiso]

Originally Posted by Skirge01

Just to be clear, you're still talking about either streamed 1080p or recorded 1080p, not Blu-rays, correct? I'm still wondering whether the unit can actually play original Blu-ray content. If not, then it's a no-go for me. If it can, I'll be picking one up for sure and seeing if it can do 3D (not hopeful on that last one ).

Yep, talking about files; both streamed and local. I don't have a Blu-Ray drive, but I cannot imagine that this system could not handle playback from a physical medium. I played a 2K file today fullscreen on a secondary display (connected via a USB DisplayLink adapter), while running Office Excel on the primary display without any video lag ...

[mikejaner]

Originally Posted by wayner

this would be the same as any PC based client - you would need an IR receiver and use a remote control. You could also use the web based remote control from your smartphone but that can be a bit cumbersome.

It has Bluetooth also

[mikejaner]

Originally Posted by jchiso

Get one.

It plays 1080p and 1080i flawlessly. Windows 8.1 flies on this thing. Boot time is really short, reads and writes are fast. I've loaded Client and Placeshifter, in addition to XBMC, Slingplayer Desktop, VMWare Horizon Desktop, and Office 2013, as well as some hardware drivers and it still has 14.1 (of 24.5) GB free disk storage.

Now all I need to do is find or re-deploy another Server license ...

Got mine today. Loaded it up with Plex, VLC, Sage Client, Firefox etc....

What codecs are you using? VLC is smooth with anything I throw at it, but the default codecs in SageTV are choppy with my HDHR Prime recordings. It's not a CPU thing, because the CPU is only at like ~20-30%

Edit: I think it has to do with plugging into a monitor with speakers for testing. I saw very choppy, and studdery video on Plex Home Theater too. When I went into settings, and turned off all the AC3, DTS etc... settings, it played back video perfectly. I have to see if SageTV is doing something with audio too. This thing is fast and should have no issues with video.

[jchiso]

Okay, after having a weekend to play with this thing more I've encountered some problems. The driver for the Intel HD graphics adapter does not include an HDMI audio driver. It seems that the "video" source has to provide the HDMI audio component. This may be the case with other Intel graphics drivers, but most of my systems are AMD/Catalyst-based systems, so I've never encountered these problems.

Also, try as I might, I could not get the thing to output a 720p video signal; it keeps forcing the output to 1080p or 1080i. This may not be a concern to those of you with modern equipment, but I still have a 720p DLP front projector in my media room, which accepts a 1080i signal, but is less than ideal in terms of scaling and image quality.

Back to the audio problem, it seems like the system will not pass a DTS signal, and all though it does support 5.1-channel AC3 (Dolby Digital) in XBMC (Kodi) it would not do so in Sage. Audio was restricted to PCM.

In terms of Sage configuration and codecs, I've been using the Microsoft video codecs and have tried various audio renderers without any real success. At this point, Zotac does not have any system drivers on their website, so I'm at a loss for resolution to these problems ...

[mikejaner]

The NIC died on mine after two days. Doesn't even show up in the Device Manager. RMA for a refund is my current idea.

This may be my next candidate... http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...%29-_-56501007

[tvmaster2]

Originally Posted by jchiso

Get one.

It plays 1080p and 1080i flawlessly. Windows 8.1 flies on this thing. Boot time is really short, reads and writes are fast. I've loaded Client and Placeshifter, in addition to XBMC, Slingplayer Desktop, VMWare Horizon Desktop, and Office 2013, as well as some hardware drivers and it still has 14.1 (of 24.5) GB free disk storage.

Now all I need to do is find or re-deploy another Server license ...

do you have any way to measure how much electricity it uses, in kwh?

[nyplayer]

Originally Posted by mikejaner

http://www.geeky-gadgets.com/zotac-z...99-28-08-2014/
Here's a video from Zotac https://www.youtube.com/watch?featur...&v=rJGAFLuKuZk
Looks pretty neat for such a small package.

2 things I do not like about it.

1 The lan Speed
2. No USB3 ports

If it had these it would make a nice Small Server. and client.

[jchiso]

Originally Posted by tvmaster2

do you have any way to measure how much electricity it uses, in kwh?

I don't have a meter, but I believe some of the online reviewers may have posted some measurements ...

[mikejaner]

Originally Posted by nyplayer

2 things I do not like about it.

1 The lan Speed
2. No USB3 ports

If it had these it would make a nice Small Server. and client.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...%29-_-56501007

[TechBill]

Originally Posted by mikejaner

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...%29-_-56501007

Hrmmm ...

I wonder if it will be powerful enough to run headless SageTV server, save recordings from HDTV (using USB hub for more than one HDTVs) to a NAS and also stream contents to clients or extenders.

I don't run comskip or anything like that on my server and my CPU usage is like tiny so sometime I feel like I am wasting money on electricity running a full size desktop for recording and storing recordings.


Bill

[mikejaner]

Originally Posted by TechBill

Hrmmm ...

I wonder if it will be powerful enough to run headless SageTV server, save recordings from HDTV (using USB hub for more than one HDTVs) to a NAS and also stream contents to clients or extenders.

I don't run comskip or anything like that on my server and my CPU usage is like tiny so sometime I feel like I am wasting money on electricity running a full size desktop for recording and storing recordings.


Bill

I would think so. Usb3 drives with gig eth to the network for multiple clients should be easy. Two gigs of memory might limit the number of clients, though my quad core Athlon from 2009 with four gigs of ram is sitting at practually idle with only 1.6 GB in use. And that with a lot of stuff going on,like a web server, com skip, etc. I know comskip uses more cpu etc. I just mean it's a server doing a lot of stuff.

[wayner]

Originally Posted by mikejaner

Two gigs of memory might limit the number of clients, though my quad core Athlon from 2009 with four gigs of ram is sitting at practually idle with only 1.6 GB in use.

The real bottleneck on number of clients is the 1GB limitation of JVM. This may somewhat depend on what UI and plugins you use but my system struggles when I have about 4 clients and pretty much totally dies when I have 6 connected. In this instance I am defining client as the UI on the server plus extenders - either HD-200s or HD-300s.

[stefano540]

I just replaced an old (but functional !) HD 100 extender with a Lenovo Q190 and everything works perfectly running my spare Sagetv client license.
I replaced the spinning media with an SSD to get the most performance out of it and I am very impressed. For $200 it came with Win 8.1 included, a 1.6Ghz dual core Celeron and 4GB. The 500GB HD has a bad reputation so I cloned it and replaced it. Reviving an 8 year old MCE remote and its IR receiver was amazing. Everything works perfectly as if it was meant to be
I am also running a display for my security cameras in the background, so that when I minimize Sage, I see that screen. No impact on playback performance!

In fact, what would be really fabulous to do is to make Sage minimize itself instead of running the screensaver and somehow filling the screen upon typing OK. Is that possible ?
Stefano

[KryptoNyte]

That seems like a pretty good deal:

http://www.amazon.com/Lenovo-Q190-57...ref=pd_cp_pc_0

I'm surprised they could afford the 4GB of memory.

[stefano540]

Forgot to mention that it comes with a VESA 75x75 and 100x100 mount that the unit clips onto, making the installation completely invisible. I am also noticing better audio and color saturation compared to the HD 100.
So far, very happy,
Stefano

[jchiso]

Originally Posted by stefano540

Forgot to mention that it comes with a VESA 75x75 and 100x100 mount that the unit clips onto, making the installation completely invisible. I am also noticing better audio and color saturation compared to the HD 100 ...

How are the audio devices set up on the unit? Is there a fully-capable HDMI audio playback device? I think that's the biggest drawback of the Zotac unit. I'm hoping there will be updated drivers from Intel or Zotac, but as of now the audio out is pretty limiting ...