just received this Zgemma h7. Massive thanks to my friend @airdigital.
First impressions have been very good, the box comes well packaged with all your usual requirements, UK plug, hdmi lead, user manual, the sata cable connection for the h/drive and screws.
However when installing the hard drive, the plate supplied dose not take into account the hard drive electrics, usually there is little "o" rings for the screws, without these there is a potential for a short, so either insulate the drive itself with some tape or find some little "o" rings to suit, which i what i did as that will also limit vibration/noise from the drive spinning.
Upon plugging in and turning on it is immediately apparent how fast the box boots up. Full cold boot to display of a channel takes 33 seconds (on atv 6.1 image)
Please note for all testing i will be using the latest openATV 6.1 image (unless the image lets me down lol)
New to the Zgemma range is full Kodi so i start there, in the plugin feed is Kodi 17.3 krypton which installs to the hard drive without any drama. As im not much of a kodi user, i installed a well known "lite" build done by @wookie_wizardry. This build works very well on the zgemma but still utilises the enigma2 media player, just like any other enigma2 kodi capable box i have used.
Swapping from enigma2 to kodi again is very fast, way quicker than my VUduo2 was and is comparable to my VUuno4k which is unsurprising as they share similar chipsets.
A gigabit ethernet connection is also a first for this Zgemma
So ran a telnet test:
Welcome to openATV for zgemmah7
openatv 6.1 zgemmah7
zgemmah7 login: root
Last login: Fri Jul 21 01:57:24 CEST 2017 on pts/0
root@zgemmah7:~# ethtool eth0
Settings for eth0:
Supported ports: [ TP MII ]
Supported link modes: 10baseT/Half 10baseT/Full
100baseT/Half 100baseT/Full
1000baseT/Half 1000baseT/Full
Supported pause frame use: Symmetric Receive-only
Supports auto-negotiation: Yes
Advertised link modes: 10baseT/Half 10baseT/Full
100baseT/Half 100baseT/Full
1000baseT/Half 1000baseT/Full
Advertised pause frame use: Symmetric Receive-only
Advertised auto-negotiation: Yes
Link partner advertised link modes: 10baseT/Half 10baseT/Full
100baseT/Half 100baseT/Full
1000baseT/Full
Link partner advertised pause frame use: Symmetric
Link partner advertised auto-negotiation: Yes
Speed: 1000Mb/s
Duplex: Full
Port: MII
PHYAD: 1
Transceiver: internal
Auto-negotiation: on
Supports Wake-on: gs
Wake-on: d
SecureOn password: 00:00:00:00:00:00
Current message level: 0x00000007 (7)
drv probe link
Link detected: yes
Display More
So all good there:thumbup:
As this is a 4k UHD box best i test that...., i plugged in my motor and install a motorised channel list, there are a few FTA 4k channels which work great on the H7, so nice to finally have some 4k channels on my UHD telly lol....
Multi stream dvbSX was new in the zgemma h5 plus models, this also works well in the h7 as tested on the 5W satellite.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYpD8CZ9RD4
Blind scanning of sats works well (software based) and is very fast, arm chipsets simply work way better than the old mips ones....
Dvb/c also tested and works well on UK cable...
SOME THOUGHTS FROM A AMERICAN USER ............. (thx supwiddiss )
The H7.AC is the USA version which has a single plugin dual tuner Si2169D DVB-S2 and MSB1237 ATSC tuner.
For my region it came loaded with OpenATV 6.1
I did not think (uneducated at the time) to backup the unit before upgrading to version 6.2.
Preloaded channels and transponders are not the same as what is provided in OpenATV 6.2
So, please perform a complete backup before you upgrade.
Hard drive. I have installed a 2.5" 1tb laptop drive. Yes, they only supplied 3 screws and no spacers to protect the drive pc board.
Certainly getting a small bag of washers is easy. Job done once I scoured my pc parts bin for the missing screw.
The rest is just simple drive initialization and setup in the menus. I'm running a swap file on my setup, although it's said it's really not needed.
Do not consider an SSD for your box. Platter drives are more suited for sequential reads/writes that recording and playback does.
Okay. Blind scan. NO. I put a post on tvrosat to address a very detailed blind scan how-to.
It will not do a hardware blindscan. Something hard to believe after using Dreamlink and Linkbox receivers.
And for me, turbo8psk is out of the question also. I've searched for a plug in tuner with the capability and drivers for the H7.
For now, the H7 is c band only for me. And that's cool.
I'm using a Titanium Satellite ASC 1 dish mover.
If you use a dish motor and setup diseqc to move it. Using the blindscan files as is then moving your last scanned to bouquets (mine are labeled by satellite)....your dish will not move if you choose a blindscan channel. Easy fix!
As for all of the other things mentioned, it really has a nice picture. Mine was a bit expensive, but within my budget.
PIP? 4:2:2? Perhaps in the future. Or drop a pile more samolians and find one that does now.
I have lots to learn still. I'm an EE, so this is a fun piece of equipment.
I wish full blown Kodi, Kodi builds could be moved entirely to my HDD. Initial Krypton install all but exhausted internal storage.
A brief trial with IPTV watching 4K content was nice with the gigabit ethernet port.
An app-to-sd like Android application has would be a plus. You eat up internal storage and the box gets sluggish.
Oscam works well on it. Once you find all of the right settings. Plugins are in ipk format. Not widely supported here.
The above mentioned compatible chipset receiver files for Oscam sometimes don't work so well.
Please feel free to ask any questions, if i can help answer i will.
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