Asrock Ion 330 and XBMC

welshdragon

welshdragon

welshdragon

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Right, in my quest for a media streamer/htpc I have now come across the Asrock Ion 330.

Anyone got the Asrock Ion 330 and what are your thoughts on it?

Secondly I am unsure if I do get it whether to use XBMC Live or use windows/linux and and the XBMC client on top. Any thoughts on both?

In addition to movies I wnat to play music and view photo's. I understand that xmbc does music but does it also do photo's?


If I were to use the live option does it have a web browser?

Any help appreciated as very new to all this.

Also, considering a logitech dinovo mini as the main input controller, any thoughts on this?
 
i went from using live to win7 with xbmc ontop when 10.1 started using hardware decoding properly in windows. See no reason to use live now, i can now just close xbmc and use spotify, browse the net etc and the re-open xbmc as and when i want to :)

Didn't personally figure out how to use a browser with live. photos work out of the box though.
 
Sounds good mate. Shame it doesn't have a browser as would be good to boot straight into xbmc and do it all.

Do you have an atom htpc or something more substantial?
 
If you want free I would recommend ubuntu, which although a pain to learn to use linux if you haven't done so before can lead to a very light weight install for a low power machine. Mine runs 24/7 as a server box, and so far its been up for the past 6 months roughly without problem.

Only issue with linux, sometimes the updates you apply may undo things you have set-up depending on the packages so you may then have to go modify settings again, personally I avoid doing anything to it once it is happy and working. That is mostly due to me being new to linux.
 
I have the ion 330 and like it. Although I think it chugs a bit on 1080p video - unless you can get hardware acceleration working, which apparently is quite tricky in windows
 
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Just had a reply from ASRock regards their new models:

"The new range is roughly scheduled in mid June with Sandy Bridge platform for our COREHT.

The new range are roughly scheduled in mid July with Sandy Bridge platform for our VISION3D"
 
Why does everything have to be 3d?! i cant see 3d! dont wan to pay extra for some crap i cant use. grrrrrrr apart from that...new stuff looks good :P
 
Also, using a synology nas to store my movies.

If I use XBMC will it automatically sort them and apply art/info etc so that they look nice instead of file names or do I need to do that? If so how do I do it?
 
welshdragon said:
Also, using a synology nas to store my movies.

If I use XBMC will it automatically sort them and apply art/info etc so that they look nice instead of file names or do I need to do that? If so how do I do it?
Click to expand...

Yes, just need to add the folder to the library.
 
Right, I have now decided to build a htpc having found a set of components I like:

ASRock E350 Fusion Board
4gb DDR3
Antec ISK-100 case incl 90w psu
250gb WD 2.5" HD

All for a princely sum of £200. Albeit sacrificing a dvd drive.

Once ordered will get a build log going. Just been looking at teh acse with an ION build and its tight! ooh er!
 
I have my pc on dual boot system (kind of) I have win 7 on my hdd for normal use but also have xbmc live on a usb stick so when I want media I just plug in the usb and xbmc boots in seconds
 
Wait wait wait don't order that! Go over to the xbmc.org forums and check it all there, the ion stuff is much preferred I believe due to xbmcs ability to use hardware decoding for films!
 
Thats odd. From everything I've read on their forum xbmc offloads to the 6310 nicely??

I think the only current issues are if you use the xbmc live install, although that is in the process of being addressed.

Using windows 7 I should hopefully not see any problems.
 
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