The Elektron 606 Mini is a HD Video Player and is known as a “Networked Media Tank”.
The hardware in the device is coming from a company called Syabas. They produce their own NMT called the Popcorn Hour. The Elektron 606 is based on the same platform as the Popcorn Hour A110.
The Elektron 606 is manufactured by Elektron China: http://www.elektron-china.com/en/viewproduct.asp?id=180
CPU
Memory
256Mbyte DDR RAM
32Mbyte Flash ROM
Support for video codecs:
H.264
VC1
MKV
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DivX
XVID
MOV
AVI
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And audio:
Flac
MPEGAudo layer 1&2
mp3
OGG
AC3
AAC
WMA
WMA RPO
DD5.1
DTS original data output
The IO ports are
2x: USB 2.0 ports (supporting external CD ROM/DVD ROM/Portable HDD/USB storage/WIFI card
1x: USB 2.0 device port to connect PC storage for exchanging data optional built-in HDD.
1x: 10/100Mbps auto ethernet port: networked harddisk or connect to a share to decode video and audio
Video ports:
HDMI1.3 (digital video and audio signals)
YPbPr
Composite Video output
VGA (D-SUB)
Coaxial 5.1 digital audio output port (NO Optical SPDIF)
Stereo double audio output (Audio R/L)
Optional harddisk:
It comes wit a remote Control
The supported languages are
The Power Supply
The dimensions:
The following steps are based on the available firmwares on 26 oktober 2008.
Download 2 files from the elektron-china.com downloads section:
Extract these files onto a clean USB-stick
Rename 00-17-080808-15-ELE-403.nmt to syb8634.nmt
Your USB stick must contain:
usbupdate.htm
50-17-080818-15-ELE-404-000.bin
syb8634.nmt (was: 00-17-080808-15-ELE-403.nmt)
Restart the Elektron 606
Once started plug in the USB-stick you prepared
Open the USB-stick and select file mode
Navigate to usbupdate.htm and press Enter
A simple web page is shown
Press Enter if you want to upgrade
If you continue you will see a nice progress screen
The device will upgrade and reboot
Finished
I bought a Western Digital external 1TB harddisk for 95 Euro's, it as cheap as the equivalent internal harddisk (Western Digital Caviar Green WD10EACS), which was on sale for the same price, but I had to order it. I could pick up the external version directly.
Inside the external version there was a 1TB Western Digital Caviar Green WD10EAVS. I could not find an important difference between WD10EACS and the WD10EAVS.
Below you will find some pictures of my installation.
Do NOT apply any force, retry when needed. Take your time!
I decided to open up the device to nicely fit the disk inside.
The SATA cable is quite firm, when you open the device you can position it much better. The power cables are a bit too long, you can also nicely put this along the side of the disk if you open it.
If you open the device completely like I did, ensure you but the screws back gently. It is not that difficult. I read someone applied too much force and he ended up with not being able to nicely close the unit.
The harddisk bay has a 'glider' mechanism on the bottom, I missed it and put the harddisk bay on top of it, which is 2 millimeter to high, this is not going the work…
In the picture of the open unit you can see some audio and video cables in the left top corner, they touch the harddisk. (The blue wires next to the COAX output). I gently moved them so the harddisk bay could be closed completely. If you don't have the top open you will not notice this and you could harm the cables.
I decided to install the NMT software onto the clean harddisk. This requires the linux Ext 3 filesystem to be installed onto the disk. Ext 2 will probably also work, but Ext 3 is the improved version so I decided to use it.
Below you can see the steps it took for me.
The installation starts when you go to:
Maintainance → NMT Setup Wizard
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-
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The
FAQ, with important things like:
I used http://www.fs-driver.org/index.html
I did not use the auto function but under Start, Settings, Control panel, IFS Drives
I disabled the 2 small partitions and assigned the biggest to a drive letter of my choice.
For me the following problem occurs:
I could not get DVD iso's or Video_TS folders to playback. I tried re-creating the iso file, but it did not help. In the end I figured out it was caused by the VGA D-SUB output. I had it in 1280 x 768 connected to my pc monitor. Each time I pressed ENTER on an iso file I got a black screen and the device returned to the menu.
Once I attached the device to my TV via a composite cable a a HDMI cable the problem was gone. DVD's also play fine.
All the other formats do play correctly via the D-SUB cable.
I have a Philips LCD monitor: Philips 190C
The Elektron runs Samba by default. If you want to connect to it you require the username / password. The defaults are: NMT / 1234.
This password can be changed in the device setup
Power button - standby on / off.
Power button followed by EJECT to reboot.
Power button followed by DELETE to halt.
TV Mode options
Press the TV-Mode button immediately followed by the numbers below.
TV Mode + 0 = Auto TV mode
TV Mode + 1 = Component/Composite NTSC 480i
TV Mode + 2 = Component/Composite PAL 576i
TV Mode + 3 = reserved
TV Mode + 4 = HDMI/Component 720p50
TV Mode + 5 = HDMI/Component 1080i50
TV Mode + 6 = HDMI/Component 1080p50
TV Mode + 7 = HDMI/Component 720p60
TV Mode + 8 = HDMI/Component 1080i60
TV Mode + 9 = HDMI/Component 1080p60