HiJack's hunch is turning out to be correct... Ziova seems to be shutting itself off from the outside world.

From the Ziova web site
--> Please note that due to changes within Ziova, these forms are now “read only”.

Why would they do this I wonder?

Peter
p.s. the very last thread was a discussion of a unresolved issue between an unfortunate purchaser and Ziova / its UK reseller - neither of whom wanted to take back his faulty product.

Hi Peter, good to hear us old Ziova forum members are still around. Bit of a surprise to hear that Ziova shut their forum, hope it's not a bad omen...

On a positive note, I received an email from Ziova this afternoon agreeing to honour the warranty on my CS615 by sending it for replacement directly to them in Oz from the UK. Was going to update the thread you refer to but discovered it was now read only.

I have some sympathy for Ziova here. I read the forum every now and then, and all I see are people complaining. For example, Ziova recently add MKV support to the 615 firmware. However, instead of some enlighten discussion of the new feature, how well (or badly) it performs; all we got was people bitching about some minor bugs not being fixed in the updated firmware. True, it would be nice to have a few of the bugs fixed, but surely MKV support is very important, and that is what the update was to address. So, I guess, finally the guys “down under” got fed-up, and just closed the site to more abuse. Can’t say I blame them. I hope Ziova survives, it’s not an easy area in which to make a living.

Hey RudiK... good news about the replacement.
I just went to post a new topic and found out myself that the forums had been shutdown. Not a good sign at all.
I was hoping to post a topic about whether there was any software or other method to get the new MKV support working using UPNP.
I don't use SMB due to the crap simple file sharing requirements, so use UPNP for everything. I think the latest version of Twonky may have MKV support for UPNP, but don't want to spend money on it if it doesn't work...

I was also one of the last people to post over at the Ziova forum. It got pointless in the end as people complained about the smallest of things and productive discussion about new ideas and techniques disappeared.

I have been using their products daily for many years (and I'm not associated) and yes there were some minor problems, but nothing like the things you would if you were a new user to read the forums. People seemed to expect it to do everything short of brewing their coffee! No wonder they shut it down.

I still continue to enjoy my 3 Ziova devices every day. :cool:

I too use my 3 year old Z500 almost everyday. I love it. Yes, it has a few problems, but it does what I need.

Terrible sign that Zensonic / Ziova chose to shut down the forum for users of their products including the Z500 and the newer products. It's true that there were a lot of posts informing them of bugs or defects or flaws or problems with the products, but heck, the products did have a lot of problems. For instance, on my Z500, the firmware just <i> disappears </i> at random, and then I have to reflash it.

At least the forum gave me a place to try to find bug fixes and other tweaks. Half the reason I bought the darn thing was that it had an active user community, and Ziova / Zensonic seemed to be pretty open in the beginning.

You could see where all this was going, however, as the forum moderators became more and more thuggish, moving posts and deleting posts, and getting in petty arguments with the users.

I think Ziova / Zensonic is going to fold before too long. It's certainly not going to help that they have frozen out the forum. I'm sure the next step will simply be to delete it from existence and take it offline. It won't be great PR for them to have a forum frozen in time to record all the bugs in their firmware.

The real tragedy of the thing is that the hardware was terrific! I think they just failed to hire the right folks. They also failed to fully release the source code, which would have made their products an instant hit for hackers. Too late now.

(Noob to AVS Forum)

Bought my CS-510 in April, had major audio problems in June - fuzzy, distorted, muffled. Downloaded & reloaded firmware, which was no help. I shelved it due to lack of time. Tried recently to contact Ziova for warranty service - no response. Comments/advice? Thanks.

impeyr, I'm sure as a CAN citizen you have better options than people in US or EU for getting support. There's no excuse for Ziova having made the CS-615 more expensive than the CS-505 while stripping the most expensive parts from it (DVD player and DVD licenses) and then choose for IDE and HDMI 1.1... Off course people dispute such choices if it leads to hardly available hard drives (IDE) instead of using and IDE to Sata bridge) and leaves no options at all for HD Audio since using HDMI 1.1 while every reviewer including me recommended 1.3... There was a very clear way to do what is most beneficial for Ziova on all fronts than what is most beneficial for consumers...

We still believe Ziova did not want to make the investment in developing more hours to support HD Audio (important for MKV, opens backdoor for BD support like Tomacro, Kaiboer and TVIX already have competing with the Hybrid HDI Dune players that are full Blu-ray / Media player combi's) and so on...

My hunch back then was Ziova going to fail and since I'm not a pro, the way I said things caused a quite obvious writing war by Ziova and it's developers towards MPC stating we don't know what we are talking about. I guess by now it's clear we do... as they still not sell anything in US or in EU there's 0 interest against the lack of interest from Ziova or it's abilities to accept criticism...

There's no way anyone can explain how Ziova made these decisions while everyone asked for different things. We assume Ziova made the player much earlier and because of that was based on lesser specifications... Neither the removeable drive cage was good (hard to come out, unuseable for anything so why make it removerable in the first place?)

The player was made for Ziova's easy way to make money... Not for the customer as they asked something totally different and to be honest, the fact they not immediately added MKV (and the first version was a poor attempt) was quite a brilliant mistake...

I hope they come back as we need more versatile options but we do watch and stick to our opinions based on facts regardless of which brand or product and if the product is no good or we see no future in it, hence... that's what we will announce...

Most people with CS-505 / CS-510 also have been left in the cold once the 2.0 firmware started developing for over 6 months and after the release Ziova did hardly make any updates and in fact took away several features with the explanatoion "we never officially announced these so it's our choice to make"...

Or what about "the forum community is hardly 1% of our customers..." Would we not expect Ziova would be the Microsoft of Media Players by now and not thriow in the towell in US and EU...?

Biggest issue with them (Raaj and Greg) is running multiple business (PC stuff, Web hosting) and media players have been just a "side effort" wotrking with investors spending limited money to lift the products and support to where it needed to be... Anyone can have his own opinion off course about Ziova or me... The truth is out there showing, isn't it?...

Good folks, bad business politicis and not enough efforts...
Turned out we expected it to become a poor experience, and can we say it's not exactly that today? I don't even want to talk how bad things are for their existing customers right now with closing down everything and pulling back from the US... Few get good support (via resellers) but many do not...

From Ziova support...
----------------------------------------------------------
Hi
You will need to send the CS510 back to Australia for repair
You will also need to pay for return shipping

Please let us know if you would like to proceed

Regards,

Ziova Support Team
----------------------------------------------------------
Had I known their "one year warranty" meant paying roumd-trip shipping from US to Australia, I would have NEVER bought this piece of junk.

Oh well... I have an Iomega ScreenPlay Pro HD on order. No matter how good the Iomega is, I know I can get warranty repair in the USA!

Here endeth the lesson.
- Sean Connery in The Untouchables

Sliceware.com is gone now too.

Pity the potential was not realised, and the glimpses of positive engagement with customers was more than offset by negative behaviours (of both ziova and some customers).

Unreasonable customers seemed reasonable towards the end and was symptomatic of how we were being treated.

I hope theres something decent to replace the Z500 when it fails - works a treat except for the HDMI bug added with the V2 firmware, and is in daily frontline use with kids, teens and spouse.

I was sorry to see the Ziova/Zensonic Forum go. I enjoyed both of my z500s and recommended them to several friends who have likewise enjoyed them as well. I still use mine everyday but I believe the player had reached a deadend. I now use HTPCs instead in my house with one z500 still soldiering on in a bedroom. It was fun while it lasted.

Hi all,

I had wondered what was going on at Ziova/Zensonic. I have 2 z500s and have been pretty happy with them. However one just started showing some odd behaviour, when I select a file (small, low quality avi) it takes ages to start and after a minute or less becomes very choppy and unwatchable.
I went to the forums to see if there were any ideas and found that the place had been shut down. So my question is, has anyone seen this behaviour and is there any user forum where I might look for an answer? I've updated the firmware to 2 to no avail and so I've gone back to 1.7 (I didn't like the new interface). The problem may go away after leaving the unit idle for several minutes after startup which makes me think there's a process that's using processor time that dies after a period of time. Since Zensonic removed the telnet capabilty I have no way of checking this of course.
The other z500 is fine. I might try swaping them over, matbe it's a network thing, I'm using wireless.

cheers

Patrick.

I have some sympathy for Ziova here. I read the forum every now and then, and all I see are people complaining. For example, Ziova recently add MKV support to the 615 firmware. However, instead of some enlighten discussion of the new feature, how well (or badly) it performs; all we got was people bitching about some minor bugs not being fixed in the updated firmware. True, it would be nice to have a few of the bugs fixed, but surely MKV support is very important, and that is what the update was to address. So, I guess, finally the guys “down under” got fed-up, and just closed the site to more abuse. Can’t say I blame them. I hope Ziova survives, it’s not an easy area in which to make a living.

This is so incorrect. We were bitching about Ziova charging more for the CS615 over the CS505 while having stripped off the DVD, costly licenses for macrovision and so on, fitted the new CS615 with IDE drive instead of SATA, fitted it with HDMI 1.2 / 1.1 without ability to support HD audio and a useless removeable drive cage...

That's the reason Ziova was targetted as selling underspec'd hardware at the highest possible price. No one within Europe or US eventually wanted to sell these players under those conditions including bad support and that's the reason investors behind Ziova decided to stop injecting money and they pulled back to Australia only, if at all they even operate there with these players (don't think so)

They had such tremendous opportunity but wasted everything by wrong decision makers leading Ziova... At one end during the CS505 which we reviewed and were positive about, Ziova praised us to heaven... When we commented on the way we saw the CS615, all of a sudden we were biased and targetting Ziova in favor of others... Absolute nonsense but hey... everyone is free to believe and like what they want...

We could use a Ziova on the scene... but not with the same people behind it this time...

@pbrosnan

Hi, a couple of years late may be, but would you still have the Zensonic Z500 firmwares? I have recently acquired a couple of them, one pretty much useless the other working but flakey. The working one only has FW1.3 and I wouldn't mind trying 1.7 or 2 to eliminate the regular memory leaks/green screening. I can't seem to get these files ANYWHERE! Any help would be appreciated from you guys. Thanks

Hi,

just wondering if you got your Z500 firmware files. I have:

Directory of C:\Downloads\Z500

13/02/2011 08:42 PM <DIR> .
13/02/2011 08:42 PM <DIR> ..
09/12/2005 02:03 AM 21,098,496 1.1_recovery.iso
13/02/2006 09:34 PM 10,736,326 1.1_recovery.zip
28/01/2007 11:14 AM 6,196,767 1.6_upgrade.zip
12/12/2005 09:47 AM 1,522 Recovery CD Readme.txt
13/02/2011 08:42 PM <DIR> Z500_2.0.1_recovery
09/12/2007 01:40 PM 10,511,612 Z500_2.0.1_recovery.zip
09/12/2007 01:40 PM 1,073 Z500_2.0.1_Recovery_Notes.txt

The files are all about 20Mb.

Let me know if you still want them. From my experience the boxes are fine if all you need them for are xvids, dvds or isos but will never play mp4 files.

Is 2.0.1 the most up to date firmware?

@horde666, You are the first and only responder so I would very much like a copy of those files! If I can make the machine more stable it will be perfect, but my FW is so old it crashes in the middle of most things!

What's the best way for me to get them from you?

Really, really appreciate it.

Thanks

Matt

Anyone have any luck getting the files from horde666?

Alas, not heard anything from horde666. And this media player gives me so many headaches....I really could do with those files!