As the upgrade of my Acer iDea 510 with Windows 8 x64 and the MCE feature pack failed (See here) as well as using XBMCbuntun (See here), mainly due to issue with drivers, I have decided to give a try to Windows 8 x86.
And now, the result is really great – the HD video is playing very well and standby mode is back! The only tricky part was to force the installation of Nvidia Video Drivers for Vista on Windows 8.
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First, I did install Windows 8 pro x86.
Notice that during the installation, I did check the option to automatically activate Windows.
Next, for the Software part: I did install the Media Center feature Pack:
- On this page, request a free licence for this pack (Offer limited until 31 jan 2013).
- On the Start Screen, type “add features” to select “Add Features to Windows 8”.
- In the “Add Features to Windows 8” window, select “I already have a product key” and enter the free key got previously for the MCE pack.
- Notice that once MCE installed, the “Add Features” is not available anymore in Windows…
- Configure MCE
After that, I didn’t experience the same issue (licence not valid for activation) as I did when testing Windows 8 x64. I means that I most probably skipped a step during the first time ? Possibly I did install the MCE pack before the activation of Windows ?!
- Start a Windows Update and install Microsoft .Net 3.5 (required for the next step)
- Install and configure the latest version of Media Browser (.Net 3.5 is a prerequisite)
At that time, I noticed that MCE was reacting very slowly and not displaying smoothly movies… Just like during my tests with Windows 8 x64… To solve this, I really had to install video drivers specific for Acer iDea 510’s graphic card: a NVidia GeForce Go 7600.
Drivers for the GeForce Go 7600 compatible with Vista or Windows 7 should theoretically run fine on Windows 8. But unfortunately, the setup usually refuses to install those drivers because they don’t officially target this OS. It’s only due to information configured in the .inf file used by windows to install the drivers. It means that we can reconfigure those settings to become “compatible” with Windows 8.Download the drivers (self-extracting exe named “18070_vista.exe”) and the adapted .inf file (named “nv_disp.inf”) separately from the bottom of this page http://www.laptopvideo2go.com/drivers/vista/180.70/disclaimer/Those are unofficial drivers and not WHQL certified.Audio via HDMI is not supported by these version of the drivers. You need an older version (See replies bellow this post).Once the drivers and the .inf file downloaded, extract the self-extracting package (exe file) and move nv_disp.inf into the extracted folder (“180.70_vista”).Run the setup.exe and don’t be afraid if you see that it’s for Vista.Once installed, reboot the system. You will clearly see the difference (the resolution will be much higher – 1920×1080 instead of 1024×768 – and MCE runs now much faster).
- The issue mentioned above does not exist anymore with Windows 8.1. For that version of Windows, a version 307.68 of the NVIDIA Drivers is downloaded automatically when updating the drivers. It works fine except that there is no sound via HDMI (although there is an option “Set up Digital Audio” in the NVIDIA control panel to enable it !). If you don’t have an optical connection and need the sound to go through HDMI, you will need to downgrade the drivers to 173.90. But that one comes with other issues, much more annoying… (See in the replies)
- Install K-Lite codecs to be able to play HD movies (mkv)
- Configure the codes to play French audio by default
- Go to C:\Program Files\K-Lite Codec Pack\Tools and run CodecTweakTool.exe
- Under configuration, select DirectShow Filter
- Click Haali Media Splitter > Options tab > Languages > Audio Language Priority > enter “fre” (the three letters of French). Click Ok.
- Click LAV Splitter > enter “fre” in both “Audio” and “Subtitle” and select “Only forced Subtitle”. Click Ok.
- Click LAV Video Decoder. In Hardware Acceleration, select XDVA2 and check the two options H.264 and MPEG-2.
- Disable UAC (reboot required to become effective)
- Disable Firewall for private network
- Enable Remote Desktop:
- On the Start Screen type “system”, click on “Settings” and select “System” in the results.
- Click on “Remote Settings”
- Enable “Allow remote connections to this computer”
- Configure the Speakers 5.1
- Right click the speaker in the sys-tray and select “Playback Device”
- At the bottom of the tab “Payback”, click on “Configure”
- Select the second 5.1 in the list of “Audio Channels” (with 2 speakers on the back).
- Create a new user with MCE instead of the windows shell
- Create a new standard user “Media Center” without password
- On the start screen, type “Create User” and select Settings
- In the list of results, click on “Create Standard User Account”
- Select “Add a new user in PC settings”
- Under “Other Users”, click on “Add a User”
- At the bottom of the page, click on “Sign in without a Microsoft Account”
- At the bottom of the page, click on “Local Account”
- Enter the name “Media Center”, nothing else (no password) and click Next.
- Change the picture of the user “MediaCenter”
- Go back to the Start Screen (Ctrl + Esc)
- Click on your account in the top-right corner and select “MediaCenter”
- Wait while Windows prepare the PC for this user.
- Once on MediaCenter’s Start Screen, open IE and find a nice picture, right click on it and save it in the picture library.
- Go back to the Start Screen and click on MediaCenter’s account in the top-right corner to select “Change Account Picture”
- In “PC Settings/Personalize/Account Picture”, select Browse and pick the picture from the libraby
- Possibly: enable Room Correction in the Speakers Properties\Enhancement… (microphone required )
- Configure MCE Media Library and the Screen Saver
- Run MCE
- Go to the Tasks > Settings
- Select Media Libraries and configure them
- E.g.: Add the “Pictures” folder of the NAS. This one must be either public or the user “MediaCenter” must be granted access via the NAS user management UI.
- Go back to Tasks > Settings
- Select Pictures
- Select Slide Show Screen Saver
- Check that the option “Play my favorite pictures …” is enabled
- Set the delay before starting the Screen Saver
- Save
- Select Favorite Pictures
- Select Use All Pictures (Or anything more relevant)
- Sign-out (Via the Start Screen, right click the account in the top-right corner, …)
- Replace the Shell Explorer (explorer.exe) of MediaCenter with MCE (ehshell.exe)
- Log in as an administrator
- On the Start Screen of the administrator, type mmc and select mmc.exe in the list of results
- Type Ctrl+M to Add a Snap-in
- Select “Group Policy Object”
- Click Add.
- In the new window, click Browse
- in the new window, open the “User” tab and select “MediaCenter”.
- Then click Ok, Finish and Ok.
- Back into mmc, select in the left pane: Console Root > Local Computer\MediaCenter Policy > User configuration > Administrative Templates > System
- In the right pane, double-click on “Custom User Interface”
- In the new window, check “enable”
- Under the Options, type in the field “Interface file name”: %windir%\ehome\ehshell.exe /mediamode
- Switch to the user MediaCenter for testing purpose!
- Create a new standard user “Media Center” without password
Here is the list of MCE switches (most of them provided by Andrew Cherry and Missing Remote) that can be used as on the command line ehshell.exe
- /nostartupanimation – disables the startup animation
- /noshutdownui – removes the shutdown item from Tasks
- /mediamode – start in “media only mode” with no minimize/close buttons (use F4 to quit MCE)
- /widescreen – force widescreen mode
- /directmedia:general – force full screen
- /directmedia:video – force full screen and navigate to the video library
- /nochrome – launch windowed mode without the containing window
- /playallmusic – Play all music at startup
- /playfavmusic – Play favorite music at startup
- /playfavslideshow – Play favorite slideshow at startup
- /playfavslideshowwithmusic – Same as above with music
- /playslideshow – Play all slideshows
- /playslideshowwithmusic – Same as above with music
- /screensaver – Start media center in screensaver mode
- /configuress – Start media center at configuring screen saver menu
Multiple switches can be enabled by entering multiple switches separated with a space in the target input.
Finally, from the hardware point of view, notice that:
- The remote control is working fine
- WiFi and Ethernet connection are working fine
- Ethernet NIC is configure to allow WOL
- The front Digital Display is recognized by Windows 8 but not displaying anything else that “Welcome To Aspire IDEA.
- I did try to install the drivers from Acer web site (named “VFD Transcoder Driver 1.01.01.zip”) successfully, but it didn’t fix anything. I am not surprised as this display was already not working with Windows 7
- Drivers are missing for the 2 Multimedia Video Controllers devices (See previous try with Windows 8 x64)
- I did install the drivers from Acer web site (named “MPC718_install_V6_13_32_1026_Oscar.msi”) and those devices were recognized without any issue.
- Standby mode works out of the box (nothing to fine tune in Windows) with the remote control.
- I didn’t change the BIOS settings since my first try with Windows 8 x64.
- Wake-up on Lan works out of the box (nothing to fine tune in Windows) if the shutdown was initiated from MCE (or XBMC – see here after). If the shutdown is done from the Start Screen, WOL does not work!!!
- I didn’t change the BIOS settings since my first try with Windows 8 x64.
- The difference in support for WOL or not depending on where the shutdown is initiated is explained here: In Windows 8, the default shutdown behavior puts the system into hybrid shutdown (S4) and all devices are put into D3. Remote Wake-On-LAN from hybrid shutdown (S4) or classic shutdown (S5) is unsupported.
- Indeed, a boot after a default shutdown is fast. On the opposite, a boot after MCE/XBMC’s shutdown is clearly much slower.
- As I don’t car about slow boot on this PC (which is usually in sleep mode anyway), I did disable the hybrid shutdown (S4) a.k.a “Fast Startup” :
- On the Start Scren type “Power” and select “Settings”.
- Click on “Change what the power buttons do” in the list of results.
- Click on “Change settings that are currently unavailable” if UAC is not disabled
- Uncheck “Turn on fast startup (recommended)”
- Select “Save Settings” and test a shutdown/WOL. It works !
Notes:
- After booting the PC, windows automatically re-log in with the last account (if this one has a blank password) (I didn’t configure that?!)
- The “Restart” feature doesn’t work. The PC shutdowns but does neither power off nor reboot… This seems to be due to the video drivers as the PC restarts fine with other drivers (but with those, the PC didn’t stay in standby mode. It was waking up immediately).
- XBMC 12 runs quite fine on Windows 8 pro too.
- Sound 5.1 is supported as soon as Speakers are configured in 5.1 in Windows (The sound is really well improved compare to the sound provided by MCE…)
- Watching movies and listening music from Synology using UPnp works very well (first time, indexing is required…)
- Remote Control MCE is quite well supported too. A Hard Reset is required (pressing the power button on the Acer for a few seconds)
- WOL works fine after either an Hibernate or a Power Off (Even without disabling “Fast Startup” in the “Power Options”).
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