The Niveus Edge: A Media Center That Will Literally Shock You
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 6 ก.ค. 2024
- I couldn't even come up with a concise title for this video because this machine is such a mess.
I realized long after I finished the video that I never actually said how much this thing cost. It was $1500. I guess I just didn't feel like that was terribly important info though, because once you learn what it does and how it does it, you realize it's not worth using at any price.
Part 1: • The Niveus Denali: 200...
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Chapters:
00:00:00 Recap of Part 1
00:05:50 Media extenders
00:11:08 The Vista problem
00:12:43 Introducing the Niveus Edge
00:16:24 What they did, and why
00:26:24 Exploring the innards
00:34:14 Thermal solution
00:42:55 Poor workmanship
00:48:35 The DVDROM situation
00:52:05 Dangerously poor workmanship
00:59:23 Inside scoop on the company
01:04:54 Theories & Conclusion
01:10:21 Outro - วิทยาศาสตร์และเทคโนโลยี
![ตีสิบเดย์ [FULL] | ครอบครัวสะท้านทุ่ง "นางบี & อ้ายสติ๊ก"](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/A1rhYcxxNtA/mqdefault.jpg)
Regarding the fan wiring: The original "fat" 360 does not have a tach input on the fan header, they added that to the slim model. I realize there are three pins, but they're just 5V, GND, 5V. That one header feeds both of the 360s original fans from separate rails, I think so that they can be PWMed separately.
Regarding the DVDROM: I absolutely would have popped the spare drive into this if it would have worked. All 360 DVDROMs are keyed to the board they were sold with originally and will not work in another console; you have to JTAG/RGH to get around that, but I have... other plans. ;)
your plans worry and interest me
Would be cool to JTAG it even it it's just to get the keys and see if a flashed drive can fire up some early games
Could you add a link out to part 1 in your description? I posted a link in the comments, but I'm sure TH-cam probably sniped it before it even had a chance lol
Also sorry for the correction, but the Xbox 360 RROD wasn't caused by solder balls breaking off the board from pcb flexing, it was the APU package underfill thermally stressing at the microscopic scale from from the silicon die (Called FC Bumps on flip chip design) This is an important because there was a prevailing myth that reflowing the package would fix it, which isn't true, it would just soften the underfill to sometimes allow temporary correction of the FC bumps (an analogy like like re-sticking tape on the wall that fell on the carpet covered in dust and hairs) This was a design flaw of the early flip chip process of which the 360, ps3, and most GPUs where using in their manufacturing, which is why we see similar issues from many machines from 2006-2012.
You could also replace the xbox board in there with a different one and see how it runs playing games.
Windows Vista's Media Center breaking XP Media Center Extenders is a Certified Microsoft Moment™.
😭🤣😂😂😭😂😂😭😂😭😂😭
It is truly one of the most Microsoft things of all time. I would expect nothing more of them.
@@nickwallette6201 every time I see a bizarre Microsoft decision that seems the opposite of what it should be, I call it a Certified Microsoft Moment™ because tradesnark is a favorite of mine.
And they never stopped
The only Extender that continued to work up through Win 8.1 was the Xbox 360. No surprise there, MS really wanted you to buy Xbox 360s from day one.
I don't know why, but "CRD reviews things that are very (very) secretly thin clients" is my favorite non-series on this channel. The NComputing episode and this are both excellent.
(not so) little guys
@@k1ndaconfused "Chonkers"
It is the one thing that finally solves his one problem with pc’s: the whatever unique thing a manufacturer can add to a fixed machine that has to work like every other fixed machine.
😂 yes!
The reveal is always my favorite part. Gravis does such an amazing job writing and performing these stories!
The PlayStation shirt is a nice touch.
but helldivers!
@@Flutterwhat this was almost certainly recorded before that shitshow.
@@snowthearcticfox1 Also, shitshow resolved yesterday. Sony backed out of their decision to require PSN accounts for PC players to play Helldivers 2.
And the shirt was probably misdirection to throw us off for the twist of "This thing is an XBox with a case mod and passive cooling."
@@Flutterwhat I don't think CRD is even that aware of modern gaming shit, more or less purposefully. Last I checked they don't play any games from the last decade or two.
Haha, I didn't even realize the "opposite" until I read this comment!
Despite referring to the years 2006 and 2007 multiple times during this video, it still felt like a kick in the gut to hear the phrase "17 years ago" at the 44 minute mark.
I won’t forget because we bought a 360 right before my kid was born, for something to do on long nights. My kid just turned 18. 😭
The red ring of death on the power button in the thumbnail is an extraordinary touch.
"These things aren't a product; they're a solution to a problem" is a much more significant line than the attention you present it with would imply lol
Oh, don't worry about grounding the case. I've been been hit by 120 VAC doesens of trimes and am prefectly frime.
Did you dead?
Except there's much higher voltages in one of those switching power supplies.
Don't know about the United States, but here in Germany there's three ways of safeguarding against electric shock.
1. Low Voltage (usually below 48V)
2. Grounding
3. Insulated Case
Of those three, every device needs at least one to be even legal to be sold. This would've never gone to market around here.
Ah, cmon, 120VAC won't kill ya.
@@LeBoomStudiosthe US has similar requirements, that’s what the “double insulted” thing mentioned in the video referred to. Hence “this is probably illegal - even here in the US”. The PSU was double insulated originally, but their mods removed that without adding sufficient grounding.
1:06:10 Can confirm; my computer nerd mom was perfectly happy to plonk a 360 next to the living room TV and connect it to the home server in the basement, fan noise be damned. Worked quite well tbh.
1:08:15 Can confirm; went apeshit
That was me too. I built my own Vista Media Center machine and had two 360's for extenders. One for my kids and the other for me to game in the bedroom. My wife would not be a happy camper when I was in some long-ass gaming session.
The design of this thing really reminds me of Konami's Python 2 arcade board. If you're not willing to look it up, it's quite literally just a retail PS2, _with the case still on_, with some custom I/O boards connected via USB and an HDD with custom firmware loaded on it similar to FreeHDBoot, all stuffed inside a metal cage with breakout connectors to hide what it really is. It even has a timer that blocks the video signal for a few seconds when it powers on so you don't see the PS2 logo! And it wasn't some aftermarket hackjob, Sony had to have approved it since its firmware is properly signed and it was far from the first time Konami had made arcade hardware that was just a modded PlayStation.
Oh my god they actually bothered to hide the logo, that's amazing commitment to the bit. I gotta see one of these.
i believe earlier system 573 is also playstation based(ps1) yes.
@@spaghetto181 573 is a custom board built around PS1 chips, Python 1 is a custom board built around PS2 chips. At some point it just became cheaper/faster to slap in a retail PS2 with some custom brackets and firmware. Namco shipped a custom board built around *PlayStation 3* chips in the Namco System 357
It looks like a parasite wrapped around the Playstation
@@CathodeRayDude So, the Python 2 board was used primarily in DDR SuperNova and SuperNova 2. Python 1 was a PS1 and ran everything from DDR 1st to Extreme. DDR X onwards moved to BEMANI PC (except for the US version which literally just has a Dell in it, and those are considered some of the worst officially licensed Konami DDR cabs in existence). Everything else arcade nowadays is PC based with a bunch of licensing dongles, and DDR switched to revenue share licensing and always-online DRM with DDR 2013, so if you are considering buying a DDR cab, don't buy anything after X3 vs. 2nd Mix unless you want to have to deal with the arcade piracy scene. (You don't.)
A lot of other arcade games of this era used modified home console hardware too, but probably not as much of an obvious hackjob as Konami did with all the classic-era DDR. The latest I can think of is Capcom using a modified Wii in Tatsunoko v. Capcom cabs. Yes, that actually got an arcade release. A LOT of games get arcade releases that never actually hit the states - hell, my local Round1 just got Street Fighter 6.
The fact that (spoilers) the WMC client boxes are just running remote desktop reminds me a lot of how Apple CarPlay (and presumably Android Auto?) work - they too just treat the car display as a dumb terminal, and do all the processing on the phone. It’s got all the same advantages, where they don’t have to worry about convincing automakers to push an update to their infotainment garbage whenever they want to add a new feature.
Fun fact: the Xbox 360 also could act as a WMC Client box. I used it all the time to watch episodes of Top Gear that were hard to find in America back in the day
I'm an Android Auto guy and was recently at my girlfriend's parent's place in Newfoundland for a bit. They have a GMC Acadia that supports Android Auto. When I was last there two years ago, it worked great. Just plugged in my Pixel 6 and away she went. This time, with the same phone, I got a giant red warning screen when I plugged it in saying something about it being blocked due to a security issue that was present and it wouldn't connect to the car. It said I should update Google Play Services to resolve it, but I did (well, it was already current, I just cleared app data) and nothing improved. The car was on its most current update too. It was really weird cause yeah, I was like "But the car itself basically doesn't do anything."
@@PXAbstraction Next time you're in the car, make sure the date and time on both the car and the phone match. No idea why that matters, but it does.
@@cannotcompute Certificates. Same reason why printers dont print if the date and time are wrong.
@@cannotcompute Yeah, the error suggested that. I got them matched down to the minute, but it didn't help. By the next time I'm there, they might have a different car and I'll likely have a different phone so it might all be moot by then. 🙂
Just some corrections on the 360 RRoD section at the end:
The actual issue wasn't with the BGA, but the die/substrate (flip-chip) connection, pretty much all 90/80nm Nvidia and ATI GPUs manufactured by TSMC between '06 and '08 or so had this fault, and they are not repairable. Only option for fixing devices with these is replacing the entire chip with a later 65nm model that uses a better underfill. It was related to thermal cycles though, the underfill material between the die and substrate would soften under too low heat, letting the die crush the solder bumps slightly, which over time caused them to crack from repeated compression/expansion. This is the same issue that launch PS3s experience, or mid-2000s iMacs, the Dell M2010, etc. Nowadays this is best known as "bumpgate"
The board flex (which caused actual BGA failures) was caused by the infamous "bolt mod" replacing the x-clamp holding the cooler on, in a poor attempt at increasing mounting pressure on the die (this only accelerated the flip-chip failure, while also again risking BGA failure).
Thank you for the corrections, I was going off what I had been told by several people since as far as I knew there had never been an authoritative source on this. The level of detail in this comment makes me feel pretty confident that you have the right of it, heh.
I think Microsoft kinda confirmed all of this in their Xbox retrospective on youtube when they had to talk about rrod and it's $1bn recall
@@CathodeRayDude If you're interested in this topic, be sure to check out RIP Felix's video, it goes into all the details regarding X360 and PS3 GPU packaging issues. Search for "A 360 Story - The RED Ring of Death & the 7th Generation Console War". Looks like I can't link it directly, TH-cam just removes the whole comment.
This comment is correct yes. Please be advised that the first fixed chips however were not the 65nm ones, but the Rhea 90nm GPUs that were installed about halfway through Falcon.
I'd also suggest looking into the PS3 Frankenmod, because all of the PS3s that were hit with the faulty GPUs are the ones that had backwards-compatibility and so the ones worth saving.
i was wondering when we'd get part two to this glorious unit. it did not disappoint one bit!
One thing I enjoy immensely about your writing is your ability to humanize a piece of computer gear. This poor lobotomized Xbox 360 is up there with Phoenix Hyperspace in terms of making me go "you poor poor soul, what did they do to you..."
ehh, my thought was that the "poor-poor-soul" moment was more in his Media Culpa video where he explains “changer-thrashing”.
As an electrical engineer i have integrated, put in a bill of materials, and written manufacturing instructions to grab off the shelf consumer products, shuck the case and plop in a product.
Monitors, wall warts, USB to audio converters, a little guy, USB hubs, LED drivers, exc
never an xbox
As a tinkerer, a lot of things I've built just have off the shelf devices inside, still in the original case, but never an Xbox.
Well the night is young...
Funny thing is some ryobi tools are just molded around a wall wart. I am sure there are a lot of other products done the same way. I have a fan which is hybrid and when you open it up it has a wall wart in it. Quite funny to be honest.
Theres nothing wrong with shucking if its the safest and economical solution.
This is a nebulous area of pro consumer products.
They probably dont want it to catch fire.
@@kameljoe21 CRD did a video on a Roybi drill battery wall plug hybrid and was shocked to find a in case UL power supply.
51:57 My wife's road bike must feel the same way when loaded onto an indoor trainer that has a floating support for the fork. "I can't feel my wheels... what happened to my wheels? Somebody please look at my wheels" "Sssssh, you have very beautiful wheels, Finn. You're upright, aren't you? Now try not to worry"
That is horrifying and beautiful.
You talk to your bike very kindly.
Maybe you see videos like this as a slog, but I genuinely cannot think of any other TH-camr that I would watch an hour and change's worth of content cover to cover and not be bored once throughout. Maybe Technology Connections would be my 2nd pick for it. But the way you present topics and stories of obscure tech that almost no one at the time paid much mind to, or even knew existed, is so engaging and enjoyable to watch. My brain doesn't really allow for me to stick to long-term projects like video making these days, but I take a lot of inspiration from you and your work when I consider maybe getting back into really doing TH-cam again. Maybe it just sounds like meat-riding, but I very much believe that you have set the bar higher for scripted, long-form content within this space of videos. Plus the fact that you don't shy away from admitting errors in videos, even going as far as redoing entire episodes for clarity's sake, makes me respect what you do even more.
I kinda went rambling but my point is, I watch your videos every time they come out whether its 10 minutes long or 2 hours long. There are very, very few people in this world I can tolerate hearing talk about shit I don't know the first thing about for an extended period of time. You're different though, and that's why you're one of my favorites consistently.
CRD and Technology Connections are the only channels from which I'm able to watch an hour long video, especially considering ADHD. They both script their videos in an absolutely informative, hilarious and focus-oriented way so that despite appearing boring in the thumbnail, the content of the video is and has been entertaining through and through.
That 'Edge' boot reveal had my jaw on the FLOOR
With how prevalent the 360's were to overheating and red-ringing, a passively cooled custom case 360 is astounding. Had it been marketed as such I know many turbo nerds with more money than sense who wouldve bought one of these back in the day.
Also about the part about h264/mpeg4, fairly certain that old dashboard/firmware doesnt support it. That didnt come out until support for playing media off USB drives was made which was well after the launch 'Blades' dashboard.
So you're saying if CRD *did* upgrade the firmware we might see MP4 playback?! I'm sure that will annoy no one, why not give it a try! 😏
Its probably worth noting that just acting purely as a media centre, it probably wasn't loaded very heavily, which would have reduced the cooling requirements.
@@TomboFry would not be possible to upgrade the firmware because of the fact that the dvd drive is missing. You would either JTAG the console or rgh 1.2. Red ringing isnt as much of an issue with the falcon/jasper revision due to the die shink.
Fun fact the blades dashboard does support USB but it was just disabled at a kernel level if I recall
The RROD was only a problem on xenons and very very early falcons
I'm an electrician and today at work a coworker ripped out a bunch of panels and set them aside for me to scrap which I'm currently doing. You always seem to upload when I need you the most.😊
The worst part about Niveus throwing away the DVD drives on the 360 is that the drives and motherboards were paired to each other with a specific key.
This means that (without significant hackery) you couldn't even hook a spare parts drive to the header to attempt to restore the drive functionality (which would likely otherwise work).
If some more knowledgeable person knows of a way, though, it would be _fascinating_ to see this monstrosity try to run some games!
But in theory, you could use those 360 DVD drives in an original Xbox via modding.
Theoretically.
In practice, the hard drive would still be faster...
You can pair another drive, if you've dumped the CPU key, but there wouldn't be much point these days, once you've gone to the effort of modding it, you can just throw the ISOs onto a USB drive.
I am thinking this is why they didn't include the drives. If it breaks during the skinning process that is a whole 360 in the bin and if one breaks while under warranty they can't exactly take the 360 back to the store for a replacement so that is the cost of a whole 360 they have to eat.
That might also be a reason not to include the drive. If they did have a drive, and the botched the transfer and broke it, then they’d have to throw out the mainbord, too. You couldn’t sell and “Edge Disc” with a non-functioning disc, and they were working at low enough unit count they probably wouldn’t sell any “non-disc” units if they also had a “with disc” option. So better to just 86 the drive, bodge the tray closed pin, and sell the filed down 360 like they did.
Hacked firmware -- which, on this early dash version, would (I think) be easier than any other equivalent model floating around on the 2nd-hand market and presumably updated to a recent version.
The 360 is still not busted open as widely as contemporary Sony and Nintendo consoles, and that's a shame. The ONE product Microsoft made in that decade that was actually pretty secure. Go figure.
God, the talk about overpriced media equipment at the start sent me into flashbacks of taking tech support calls for DirecTV. So many calls from rich assholes setting up their boxes at their summer homes (or on their boats) and getting mad at me that our receivers didn't have certain connections for their very very special audio equipment that they NEEDED to explain how expensive and special it was. Meanwhile I'm getting paid a measly $10/hr to take back-to-back calls all day while my supervisor heavily implies that if I ever need to take a shit at work, I should hold it in until my (unpaid) lunch break.
Sorry you had to deal with that but my experience with Direct TV and their tech support were all awful. They basically stole thousands of dollars from my grandma.
What do you mean it doesn't have RS-232?? How am I supposed to hook this up to my Crestron remote control that costs more than your car?!?
@@nickwallette6201 "Fortunately, sir, we can supply you with an adapter that will make your setup cost more than TWO of my car." 😜
@@nickwallette6201: If only everything did have RS-232 control, then you could rig up some cheap $5 solution to anything under the sun.
I WAS RIGHT.
Between the form factor, weird number of USB ports, fan position, and that odd Ethernet port, I was pretty sure, but the remote sold it. Laughed like a madman when you rebooted it.
That dangerous ground issue is a prime example why Class I products like this are required to be 100% tested for ground continuity and in some cases pass a 25 A ground bond test at the end of assembly. And yeah a case screw isn't a sufficient bonding technique, almost always has to be on a separate internal post with shake proof washer in order to pass the 25 A ground bond test with a low enough resistance. Seen some scary stuff come out of small companies, worst is when they acknowledge it and say the risk is negligible for the cost to change it, particularly when you mention the word 'recall'.
With that said the downside is the cost of the equipment and staff to preform those those tests and get their design certified by an NRTL is often unobtainable for many small business which just cements the standing of large billion dollar corporations that made their initial money before those safety regulations existed, hence why government grants are essential for small business.
Hello! Fancy seeing you here!
Some chinesium hifi company had a few cases of their amps literally blowing the coils out of headphones due to grounding issues rendering their DC-protection on the headphone output inoperable (not that it is a great design to begin with).
EU consumer protection only let is slide since it had an external powerbrick.
Yep. Barriers are too high to test, and too high to fix, and too high to service a recall, so it comes down to just hoping nothing goes wrong.
It's not actually a problem that the chassis isn't grounded under normal circumstances. The original design was never meant to be. The device ground was always galvanically isolated from earth ground. But, since there are mains lines running through the chassis, if those were ever damaged and shorted to the chassis, you're counting on luck that they don't touch anything conductive. A ground lug right off the IEC inlet would've fixed that easily. I can't fathom how anyone who knows enough to build a device like this wouldn't understand that.
It looks to me like a screw right besides the Earth logo on the inside of the chassis in vicinity of the power connector was possibly intended to serve as a grounding point if fitted with the correct bite washer and a correct screw. Not sure whether that's a dedicated ground screw point or whether that's a foot screw.
As to subsidies for small businesses... this depends how you see the economy. Fundamentally, VC can bring viable businesses through that initial stage where the costs are way too high to where a new company may become a big manufacturer themselves and compete on equal footing, so free-market economists would argue against subsidy. But then there are secondary potentially strategic advantages to helping businesses survive that have low inherent viability if these businesses also nurture say the engineering or manufacturing field or some other vital field.
31:42 "this probably violates a whole chapter of electrical regulations, even in the US, which is saying something"
I was doing an internship in 2008 working on embedded bootloaders for set-top boxes (seeing that sigma devices chip from the linksys extender brought me a warm flush of nostalgia!) and oddly enough, I found out through that job that while all of the american-market devices we were working on had double-shielded power supply boards, many of the european-market devices didn't!
unfortunately, I learned this the hard way, while debugging a box in one of our hardware labs. the debugging host was on one of those lab benches with equipment shelves above it, and the A/V and power hookups came out on the equipment shelves -- and while I was blindly reaching up to hit the box's internal reset switch, I instead reached into the guts of the power supply and put 120 volts across my hand.
no lasting harm done, but after that I made sure to stand up and look where I was reaching.
one of the safety posters at my job rather prominently reads "NEVER PUT YOUR HAND WHERE YOU CANNOT SEE" lol
Did it hurt??
@@tulippasta yeah, a little bit! my hand twitched involuntarily but there was no damage or pain that lasted beyond a minute or so. I’m happy I live in 120V land rather than 240V land because I’m not sure I would’ve wanted to get hurt any worse than that.
In the 90s/00s I worked for a company that basically reboxed consumer grade computer and consumer grade audio/video and networking equipment in custom metal boxes and installed them in airplanes. Since it wasn't flight critical equipment, the requirements for robustness weren't nearly as strict, and to be sure we did make our own audio and video amps and switches and control equipment ourselves. But source equipment like CD or DVD or networking equipment like switches or servers were bought at BestBuy and repackaged with aircraft grade connections and our own control circuitry.
Windows Media Center was the best product Microsoft has ever made. I used it for years, even through the dark days of Vista, until MS finally murdered it. It served all my ripped music and movies, my photos, and even my local TV broadcasts. It had a full-featured DVR with a channel guide, it supported multiple NTSC, ATCS and QAM streams at once, and served it all up over the network smoothy over a 100BT connection. (Wifi was a lot iffier.) I kept a dedicated MCE server in my basement with a RAID-0 setup for recordings, and I used several X360s around the house as extenders. It all worked seamlessly; so much better than anything I've used since, except Plex.
I also had one of those 3rd party extenders, and upgrading to Vista killed support for it. That should've been the first sign that something was afoot.
I still use it
I mean it's great, if you don't have anything that can run Kodi.
I love how the video is about a Xbox implanted into a random box while the host is wearing a Playstation shirt.
My theory as to why there is no DVD-ROM, which holds 0 weight, is that if Niveus put out a device that can play Xbox 360 games, Microsoft would have probably noticed and not liked what they saw.
I kind of love the idea of a premium 360 though. Sort of a newer Panasonic Q
@@DQSpider I would have too, if games were possible, and not at the cost of a potential electric shock
Here's a fun fact: Microsoft knew this thing existed, and must have known that it was a 360, because they put out a press release before the new Vista media extenders came out which listed it among the options. I'm sure Microsoft knew who had access to the Vista extender spec and when, so they must have known that the only possible explanation is that this was an Xbox. Your theory may hold some water.
I feel like this is more of an UX thing.
Never used WMC myself but I doubt that you could access the Xbox DVD function from WMC, similar to how the Linksys extender had the DVD player as separate.
Havjng it boot directly to WMC is _slick_ and likely idiot-proof if it's as solid as described. But if you have to ask the users that bought _this version_ to exit off WMC and navigate the Xbox menus to play a DVD?
Yeah, their heads would explode.
It looks like there just isn't room for it. You can see the case they re-used for this had an optical drive, but putting anywhere on the front and a heatpipe would be in the way. They can't substitute a smaller drive because the 360 would refuse anything but the official part.
Oh my gosh, you now own an Xbox that still has the blades dashboard?? That's the one from my childhood, I loved it even though it had a bazillion submenus and was a pretty bad user interface. It was also the most easy to soft mod, a fact I learned after updating mine to play minecraft a few years ago...
It had a bad user interface, but it also had the best Xbox 360 user interface.
It didn't really need to be good. It just had to be usable enough but provide some kind of fun fantasy experience that you were using some futuristic device. At least, as we thought the future would be.
Ps3 was better
@@SnakebitSTIhonestly imo the ones after blades and before metro were pretty solid still, the Metro 360 UI sucks absolute balls though, especially with how many ads they managed to shove into it
@@whatr0 Later updates done to the Metro 360 UI got rid of essentially all the ads, the current Metro UI it has now has virtually no ads.
Throughout the entire first half "Yeah, but what about the 360"
The entire second half "Oh my god, why did I want to know?"
Totally was waiting for you to whip out a drive with Halo in it and reveal it playing with a casual "so I did" at the end.
I think realistically the only way* to test the thermals while gaming would be to swap another entire console into this chassis cause you can't just plop another drive into this without it being a nightmare. 360 dvd drives and motherboards are tied together because microsoft saw what everyone was doing with the original xbox and decided to pull a 180 on that shit. (or a 360 i guess)
that being said i feel like taking the original hardware out of this bodged together disaster would ALSO be a nightmare so.
edit* aside from updating the firmware, anyway.
@@Hafk It looks like this is running manufacture date firmware, likely one of the easiest 360s to hack (because how many JTAG-able consoles would still exist?). Wouldn't it be easier to do that?
He could totally do that. Just disconnect the janky extra cable and reconnect the proper one connected to the DVD drive.
@@RichardDzien Is that even possible since some used different drive manufactures, like plop in a samsung when it originally had a hitachi? Im not sure how much it cares other than having a matching key.
@@RichardDzien You would have to desolder the wire from the cable.
But anyone in the 90's who had both computer experience and a beard would have known the right too to add a wire to a pin - wire wrap!
As someone who never intentionally used Windows Media Player or other builtin media stuff on XP or after (always went for Media Player Classic, VLC, and then mpv), I was completely unaware of the Media Center ecosystem, extenders etc... this was a wild ride.
FFS. I tried at the time Windows Media Center, saw it was an RDP(by picture quality) and dropped the idea thinking media playback will be streamed via RDP too. What a weird architecture.
Great review!
how the hell did I only just realize the background wall's color is the Win 95 default desktop color
also obligatory *orson welles clapping furiously* anytime I see the original 360 blade interface, god it was so damn good.
Teal?
Looks more like 2000/me rather than 95.
I have a good deal of respect for these guys. They clearly bit off a bit more than they could chew with that product portfolio, but there were legitimately clever people trying to make something work.
Like Theranos, but they actually made something.
@@SmaMan Theranos was pretty much an outright scam. They promised the moon, lied about capabilities, and failed to deliver. Niveus at least made actual products that did what they were supposed to do. They just couldn't compete on pricing or volume with any major OEM.
>be media center
>comically large profile that looks bigger than regular desktops
The original buyer would be pretty upset once they know a game console could do 80% of what this media center were designed to do, minus the funny Audiophile jacks
Whoops
You haven't met an audiophile have you?
So yeah, I was one of those people who bought an XB360 primarily to use it as a WMC Extender. I did eventually use the 360 for games too, but first and foremost I bought it to use WMC running on my desktop computer while sitting in front of my tv (without having to have a PC sitting in the home theater).
Hey you reminded me about how disappointed I was in the Xbox One when they sold the bloody thing as a home media center device, only to find out it wasn't a wmc extender. The launch of the Xbox One really was a Joke.
SilenX is pretty infamous in the silent PC space for exaggerating their specs. Prior to Noctua making quiet PC’s more mainstream, most people were getting the Nexus 120mm “real silent” fan.
Yeah I've heard from a couple people that they were apparently considered frauds. It's interesting because these fans sure do seem to deliver, but maybe that's solely because they've been slowed down so much
Over here Bequiet has been around for a VERY long time with their fans and Arctic Cooling had made a number of early attempts as well, in particular Pro series fans, but then that's Europe, Bequiet in particular had some difficulty reaching foreign markets. I remember buying a funny Sharkoon silent fan in 2005 as well, white blades, dimpled and textured like a golf ball... not a terrible fan but the dimples did nothing. I estimate that the opaque white pigment added several grams to the rotor weight, which is not terrible but not quite ideal.
On the size of the company, I worked for a company that had 45 people when I started there (they eventually dropped to under 10), and it was at least as shoddy as this company.
Most of the staff were sales.
The Falcon revision 360 actually has a die shrink on both the CPU and GPU that causes it to draw 175 watts instead of 203. I don't know if it 100% fixed the RRoD issue, but at worst it very significantly reduced it (my Falcon still works fine despite never actually swapping the thermal paste, should probably do that at some point). Among pre-Slim 360 models the Falcon is generally considered the second most desirable behind the later Jasper which has another die shrink on the GPU and pulls just 150 watts with even lower temps.
However, in 2007 and 2008 this still wasn't known. It was known revised 360's had gone out, but as for fire testing? Not so much. The Falcon literally debuted in August of 2007. So it makes sense Niveus would have been deathly terrified at the possibility at the time.
Idk whats the biggest shock here for me tbh. The wonky hardware, or the fact that only now, two decades after I first got a PC, do I learn that Media Center was meant for TVs, and not a very weirdly designed alternative to Windows Media Player that sometimes I would accidentally open and couldn’t seem to be able to quit. 11yo me was very perplexed by this piece of software lmao.
Fun fact about the DVD tray status, you can just use a jumper from an IDE hard drive to bridge the tray status and 3.3V pins. Which supports the theory that they just hacked these things together with whatever they had laying around. Also the only issue that comes up is the center LED on the Xbox 360 keeps blinking.
Does always keep blinking? IIRC the drive just gives up after a certain number of tries on the eject motors if jammed but maybe it's on the DVD drive and not the console that does the giving up and corrects the light. I dunno it's been awhile lol
@@RBRat3 from what i have seen and read that seems to be the case, i have a stack of Xbox 360's to mod (many with bad DVD drives) so ill definitely be doing some more digging into this.
I actually find it baffling that these dedicated signals even exist. I mean you do get all these capabilities, to discover whether the tray is closed and such, just from ATAPI MMC commands. And even if there wasn't, Microsoft did custom firmware on these drives, and extending MMC with proprietary features is not that uncommon.
There is a slight, very niche, benefit to blades firmware: for games that could run on it, there is a possibility that framerates and load times are slightly better. The Tony Hawk speedrunning community found that it was optimal to run Tony Hawk's Project 8 on blades firmware. very dumb! ultimately it doesn't matter though, it's possible to hack a 360 to restore the old firmware and get the same benefits
With the bloat they added, doesn't surprise me.
Your vidoes might frequently be a slog in length, but every time I muster the energy to click in, I kick myself for not having done so sooner. Even despite, or perhaps because of, their near total irrelevance to my life, I thoroughly appreciate your candor, presentation style, and humor.
1:09:02 It's actually worse than snapping the solder balls off the motherboard; it'll actually snap the balls off the die that connect the die to the chip package. Or at least it'll do that most of the time and that's why reballing was such a crapshoot.
I think the reason you couldn't get other formats besides WMV to play on the 360 is because support for those formats were added in updates to the system.
At first I was like, okay, that's a neat trick, great way to add a huge margin for a cheap xbox 360. But then that power supply hack job, holy hell. I've seen other jobs that actually just put the entire brick inside with a couple cheap straps, to keep UL cert, but wow. Just wow. Running the AC under the motherboard, even, that's just an amazingly terrible idea; at least use double-insulated wires for that! I wonder how many mansions they burned down or how many toddlers got zapped...
But I bet you're right; if they weren't in a panic they probably could have worked out how to include the entire power supply, case and all. Maybe would have needed a fourth fan to fight against the extra blockage. But some engineer says they can make it work by cutting off the case and nobody with any say in the matter realizes what a terrible idea it is.
Another option for making fans so quiet you can't hear them is to use bigger fans. I've been using the same Antec case since 2010, and it has oodles of fans with variable resistors for all of them, and in general I can turn them all down as far as they can go because the top of the case has a massive 200mm fan exhausting out the top. Zalman used a similar idea before that with a slow 120mm fan suspended over their "flower" cpu cooler in the pentium 2 era.
Yeah I was guessing that while the thermal solution might have been fine for media playback, it wouldn't necessarily be able to cope with say Halo 3. Remember that there is a difference between thermal transfer capacity, and max allowable delta. A huge passive heatsink could easily be able to shift that much heat, but that doesn't mean it could do it fast enough under crunch to keep the chips from spiking outside of their operating range.
The fact that it was neither grounded nor double wall insulated was horrifying.
This is the Falcon, which didn't have the overheating issue.
Falcon still had overheating issues. I had one and it didn't ever red ring(of death) but would overheat. You turn it on, fans would ramp up to 100% and the system would show the overheating red ring for overheating. I tried repeating it but it didn't help...
Personally it looks better cooled than the Xboxes I have opened up before and It still has a fan... Although it's been a while since I'm have opened up a 360.
TH-cam is a garbage fire
That heatsink looks better than its real thermal capability. Most of the area has high thermal impedance to heatpipes and isn't doing any work, and convection is fundamentally quite weak until you reach rather toasty temperatures. I'm quite certain the two fans blowing directly on heatpipes, even if it's a little unconventional, dissipate substantially more heat than the imposing looking external heatsink.
Did you test it with the Microsoft HD DVD player add-on? Its just mind-bendingly hilarious how this version fixes some of the early / launch XBOX 360 design flaws
lol didn't think of that
I don't think those don't play games tho.
I intend to test that in episode 3 :D
@@Fay7666 they can
that reminds me of how the original apple airport used a conductive shiny metal based paint in the first production run
creating what was in effect a farraday cage around ur wifi access point
it's one of those manufacturing errors that you don't want to call understandable - but you secretly know it could totally happen to you. it just takes one person to not think when they should have thinked, or not do their job cause they didnt really care....
The Coleco Adam computer was known for putting out a small EMP on startup that was powerful enough to erase the (proprietary, hard-sectored) cassette tapes it used for storage. They had to quickly issue an addendum to the manual saying to *not* leave tapes in the drive when booting the machine.
I not only needed this level of information for this topic, but for ALL topics! Long form videos like this enrich my life so much and I really appreciate the amount of work you put in to them. I'd be down for even longer videos tbh.. so don't worry about runtime ;3
1:02:37 Padding their product line-up may have been precisely the reason for this kind of rebrand. As you note, the number of products they offer gives the illusion of a much larger company with broad expertise, which can foster customer trust. Spending a little bit of manpower for a quick rebrand out of pocket doesn't seem that wild considering the number of products which are sold at a (sometimes significant) loss, relying on cross subsidization.
Had some custom fan less IPCs for a clean room delivered some years ago.
The behaved weird, sometimes didn't turn on, died randomly and no one had a clue. Had them go back for repair a few times without success.
One day I disconnected a Displayport cord while it was on, saw an arc and it was dead.
After that I got a DC clamp meter out, and put it on the Displayport cable. There where over 6 Amps DC from the power brick cable thru the mainboard, over the Displayport cable shield, Monitor, it's power cable earth, the earth cable in the wall and than back to the power brick. It was wild!
They all had a bad chassis ground connection from the power brick.
Had them redo the barrel jack on the back plate and since then they worked without any issues.
"i'm sure i went on a bit longer than some folks would prefer"
mate you could be pumping out 8 hour videos daily and i'd watch each and every one, your presentation style and flow are unmatched and I sometimes put old videos on just to rewatch em while I'm doing something else. they're great
Lol I remember this twist from one of your thrift videos so it doesn't land as much but it's still really amusing that they did this.
he also showed the xbox 360 startup animation at the end of the first niveus video
IVE BEEN WAITING FOR SO LONGFOR THIS, THIS IS THE HIGHLIGHT OF MY WEEK SO FAR!!!
that’s probably the best preserved blades dash 360 to date
By 2008, the Falcon revision 360 (which is almost definitely what this is) would've cured the Red Ring completely since the new GPU it had didn't have issues anymore. That was not just bad, flexy PCB's but also ATI chips that were badly manufactured because this was the early days of RoHS and nobody knew how to do it right (similar story to what got Nvidia with Bumpgate, which led to the PS3's Yellow Light of Death).
YES! I was waiting for this vid! Thanks for part 2! 🎉
I love the oddball hardware you find and the context you can bring to the table.
i installed a Media server and Linksys Media extenders for a guy back in 07-08. it was an absolute royal pain in the ass as far as network performance because the guy wanted the extenders wireless. i can edit this comment later with details, but i wanted to get the comment in
I have been waiting for this day!
This video was released a couple of minutes ago. Are you a time traveler? Haha! 🌈
Sign up for patreon. I watched it days ago…
I needed that info, the detail is what makes these videos 'gems'. Keep up the good work Dude I love this channel right now.
I'm floored by your vast breath of knowledge in things like this, and watched the whole thing in one go, thanks for another awesome video 😁
Big thanks for making a video on this HTPC setup.
"Don't worry, I'll bury the lede." The man knows his audience.
Don't apologize for the length of your videos - this (as always) was an excellent documentary. Strong work.
Finally! Thank you! I was so looking forward to this ❤
This is only tangentially related but I’ve never seen anyone else ever talk about this: when the update came to the 360 that allowed it to rip games to the hard drive, it came with the claim that it wouldn’t speed up loading by that much because games weren’t designed for it. Well, there was one extremely odd exception: Armored Core for answer (yes that’s its name) had a menu for loading mech configurations, but opening said menu took an irritatingly long time, with two loading screens, a short fake out loading screen and second much longer screen. For some reason, installing the game on the 360 completely cut out the second longer screen, I have no idea why other than it possibly being a vestigial PS3 function that somehow started working again, and I have never seen anyone else mention it online.
honestly its kind of a shame they took out the disc drive, if i was a wealthy, image focused, mid-00's guy id be so down for a classy-looking Xbox with fancy custom cooling to make it run quieter... but i guess if i was that guy id probabky scoff at Gears of War so its probabky a good thing im not
Yeah, the HD era of games (7th gen) was the time game companies were bending over backwards to make gaming look more "mature" with its gritty reboots and a color palette of brown, brown, brown, and gray.
Been waiting for this; honestly was exactly what I expected. This thing is great but terrifying at the same time.
You hit the nail right on the head. This was likely a rushed product to meant to fill in that gap before proper stuff came out that they could sell/rebrand.
April/May is when Contractors renovate rich people's homes in the Hamptons. They want products to install - Preferably a whole system of products from a single vendor. If this thing was the only Vista Media Center compatible complete lineup, that could have been a big deal. Making custom chassis would have probably been more expensive, and taken too much time, so they just reused something they already had
- This much I can speculate as someone who has worked in that area for multiple summers. You see a lot of custom made stuff from small companies you never heard of, like a custom stand up fans with legs that look like an antique brass telescope. - But if you have a good enough eye you can tell it was a standard Lasko fan put into a new housing.
There were plenty if add-on rear fan accessories that sucked additional air out of the back of the 360 using a pass through power connector. Still have one on my launch 360. All they wouldve needed was spade connectors or a massive solder blob at that point? They were all pretty crappy plastic so shucking them wouldn't have been hard and I recall them costing
Man i kinda figured what the core concept was when you mentioned the Edge being an Xbox back in your thrift haul video, but i had no idea it had a legitimate purpose.
Side note, this would be a dream to mod and load games off an external drive, assuming the wifi for the controllers is still enabled. It'd almost be like an oversized Wii.
I think one of my favorite details from your channel are the times you’ve either explained that the script for a video started out “meaner” than it ended up or (in the case of the dell xps m2010 video) to pivot on the rest of youtube and praise something generally considered a laughing stock. you clearly put so much time and thought into the analysis of a device long before you hit record. and, as you’ve mentioned, you’re all too aware that sometimes parties involved in development end up seeing the final take. you’ve done multiple great jobs showing what these devices really are, and what their places are in the great pantheon of silly and kinda busted technology.
to grouse over failings is human, to discover charm is divine.
I have been waiting for this follow-up, and it did not disappoint
All that attention to mechanical design, and then they run analog AV wiring across the RF-rich environment of an active motherboard using unshielded, not even twisted wires to the back panel RCA jacks *shakes head*. I'm a mechanical engineer and know that's a bargin-bin electronics move.
this is just a nitpick, but the 360 doesn't throw any errors if a DVD drive is missing. but it flashes the power LED rapidly (the one niveus used for their custom one).
second nitpick, still watching the video.
the 360 GPUs desoldering wasn't the issue. you can resolder a dead GPU a thousand times, and it'll fix nothing. the underfill on the GPU itself is the problem.
High end customers are a client base that's very stressful to have. I totally understand why they worked under such panic, they made promises to some big shots that they were terrified to disappoint.
I am commenting to prove I made it to the end of the video and to appease the engagement algorithms.
I have nothing to add other than that was great ride and deep dive through the entire thing. Thanks!
I remember Windows Media Center being very popular. When it was removed from later Microsoft operating systems there were still people trying to get it installed in these OS. I was never a fan of Windows Media Center. More of a KODI fan. Originally known as Xbox Media Player (XBMP) then Xbox Media Center (XBMC) for its ability to be installed on the original modded Xbox gaming consoles. With a more user friendly interface, ease of use, worked on low power systems, high media compatibility and most of all free to use.
I feel like this thing might've been successful if they just embraced the fact that it's a 360 and included the disc drive.
Then just market it as a premium 360 kinda like the Panasonic Q for the Gamecube.
Yeah maybe. But maybe that created some kind of licensing problem?
Microsoft would have had some things to say about that methinks
I think you misunderstand what the Panasonic Q is. The Q came about because Nintendo worked with Panasonic to create the disc of the GameCube (And later the Wii and Wii U) which is just a mini-DVD with just enough differences to be unable to be labeled as a DVD (On purpose, because I doubt Nintendo wanted to pay any money to Sony. You know why.)
The Edge was never approved by Microsoft. So if they did keep the DVD drives, Microsoft could of SMITED them into bankruptcy just by having one of their lawyers look at them with an angry look.
Yeah.. i DID like the longer format with all the necessary information so i get the whole picture. _Thanks !_
Been waiting for this video for a while. Can't wait to see what's next!
My god, he went almost the entire video without saying Red Ring. Gotta be a record for ANY video featuring the 360.
17:02
I guess you didn't watch the video huh
I'm surprised it didn't come up until 1 hour 9 minutes into the video!
@@neb_setabed Nah I'm just dumb of ass.
@@TheGibsOfTheTube because that's when he revealed that it's an xbox
Love that karl marx fade in!
Stay strong comrade!
I've never been more hyped for a video
Man, it is such a special talent to be able to take a literal hunk of junk and weave together a compelling story about it... You are a legend man, listening to you talk about hardware is like birdsong to me
I'm loving the red ring of death edit in the thumbnail.
I remember this period and recall trying to convince my parents to get a 360 for “just the media center” lol. Also what a great in depth video. This is the first video I’ve seen of yours but I’m in. Cheers
I have been waiting so long for this one, I can't wait!!!
the absolute depths my jaw has dropped when i saw that 360 bootup
I love these long videos, great work
Thank you for the °C numbers! Appreciate it ❤️
I really don't know why, but this was fascinating. Thx man !
Finally! i've been waiting for this
I've been looking forward to this so much
I love this channel to no end. Thanks so much!
That dvd rom drive just lived in your head rent free until this was published huh Gravis?😂😂 great video! Stream o thon planned anytime ? You deserve it. Hope you’re well! Keep pushing,your channel is one of my favorites. Thank you
Bro, I'll be honest. I have no idea what you're talking about most of the time, but I love hearing you explain it to other people.