Build your own Beomedia 1

18 replies

Thanx for the tip with the secret directory. Hadn't explored the recovery feature cause I use the ghost image from an external drive that back up the whole system every 3-6 months and just for the system partition it takes about a minute to clone.

But now that you mentioned I will give it a try. Can you give me more details?

By the way, I have a Nvidia GeForce 8600GT installed and a Creative SoundBlaster Live! for DAC, and I use only the digital output for connecting the BV9. The analog output goes only to the BeoLink PC 2 for using the N.MUSIC and N.RADIO functions through the ML system. Using Vista Codecs you can have spectacular surround sound from DivX and Xvid that utilise AC3.

Thanx for the tip with the secret directory. Hadn't explored the recovery feature cause I use the ghost image from an external drive that back up the whole system every 3-6 months and just for the system partition it takes about a minute to clone.

But now that you mentioned I will give it a try. Can you give me more details?

By the way, I have a Nvidia GeForce 8600GT installed and a Creative SoundBlaster Live! for DAC, and I use only the digital output for connecting the BV9. The analog output goes only to the BeoLink PC 2 for using the N.MUSIC and N.RADIO functions through the ML system. Using Vista Codecs you can have spectacular surround sound from DivX and Xvid that utilise AC3.

I also want to thank Beobuddy for sending me this on how to update the IE browser from 6 to 7.

http://archivedforum2.beoworld.org/forums/p/690/5694.aspx#5694

I took the risk to install it without upgrading to SP 3 first and I can tell you that it works just right as it is.

I'll try to upgrade to a later version of IE as well and give you a feedback.

Has anyone managed to tweak N.MUSIC in order to show Album Covers?

Has anyone managed to tweak PHOTO in order to play .mkv or other movie files apart from .avi, and .wmv?

Just wondering...

I have the possibility to get a Beomedia from a friend real cheap. Is it worth getting and try to upgrade ut or is it better to start from scratch?

Would it be possible for anyone to upload a video on Youtube showing your custom builds and interfaces?

BR

Riven

It's always easier to get something ready, but upgrading Beomedia 1 in my opinion doesn't worth the result if you mean to watch movies through it and have a really big song collection.

It's better to built your own both because of the challenge and the pleasure that this will give you and of the higher quality in playing movie files and songs in addition that it will be much faster and maybe reliable (depending on you ;))

Now, concerning the costs, I only had to pay for the motherboard, the CPU and the memory (initially) because I had all the rest. 

I had a 500gb HDD, a Nvidia card, a Creative Soundblaster, a wifi PCI card, a power unit, etc.

I also had the Beolink PC 2 and I think the total cost of the mb,CPU,memory wasn't more than 85€!!!

Next upgrade was a 2TB HDD and an external 1TB for back up.

So, check your costs and decide. By the way, I also have a Beomedia and a Beolink PC 2 which I'm selling.

 

I would personally get a SSD as your primary drive will speed things up, allowing quicker streaming and faster boot times.

Quick email to add two old threads from the old archived forum which might share some light on the discussion; the first one is bout the BM5 hardware specs and Beomedia Inside and Out.

I'm still running with the VIA Tech EPIA Mii motherboard as my Sonos audio bridge to my ML-network and the PC itself is only used when I'm playing 24-bit audio.

Biggest issue as I see it is that Win XP now isn't updated anymore from security perpective and I doubt that B&O will do anything about as BeoMedia is a dead platform. Don't know if they plan to move on to Win 8 with something new. Even if the drivers could be isolated and repackaged it would likely not run on Win 8.1 64-bit and doubt that it would even work on 32-bit Windows. Earlier it could be possible to move WinXP application and drivers to Win 7 32-bit which could be an option to rebuild a platform on with the right tweaking which has been mentioned in this thread.

Would be totally cool if reversed enginering could be done one the Win XP drivers to create new drivers for more modern OS. Then again, is it even possible to get motherboards with old legacy PCI-bus which is needed for the MasterLink card which used for the BeoMedia unit?

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