Official Ceton Echo Extender Info Thread - Page 5

If the Q can support a USB tuner or a network tuner, such as the Silicon Dust ATSC tuners then you can probably replace a server PC with the Q, as the Q will have eSATA and USB 3.0.

Will the Ceton tuners get ATSC support? That would make it much easier to replace a PC.

Can the Q move recorded shows to the external drives?

As long as the Echo can support high quality DVD and BD rips (folder structure, ISO, MKV) then it will have a major advantage over the Xbox 360, as the rips will most likely have to be transcoded to a native Xbox 360 format, unless you store them as wmv.

Someone mentioned the Dune player..........awesome format support. But as far as I know it, the Dune does not support live TV. I think it can stream recorded TV? So, as long as the Echo supports the "important" formats, but not necessarily all of them, then it should have it over the Dune due to the TV support. And the Echo doing all of this through the WMC UI.

In order for a product to be successful, it has to attract mass audience, not just a few geeks.[/quote]

You have a very narrow view of success, one that I think a lot of people would disagree with.


ATSC doesn't do me any good, well OK, I need that too, but without HD PVR or Collossus (or some other HD Component/HDMI capture device) the Q will not work for me. And if the Echo requires the Q for it's advanced format support it will not work for me either.

At this point I'm in a good position, because I don't have any type of set-up. I have been researching a build for a server type PC, which will use the Ceton PCIe cablecard tuner and an ATSC tuner (probably Silicon Dust). I was going to use Xbox 360's as the extenders for multiple rooms, but I am not happy with the format support for DVD and BD rips.

Because of the lackluster support I was going to build an Intel i5-2500k based PC to get good on-the-fly transcoding performance to wmv for the Xbox's. I could store the rips as wmv, but don't want to because in the theater room I was going to get a Dune for the better quality from the native ripped format.

Now, if the Q can provide both, cable TV and ATSC OTA and if the Echo can give good format support then possibly I would not need the server PC or at least I could get by with an i3 based PC, because I would not need to transcode.

Now..........I just have to wait before I start any kind of build!

It's unlikely that the integrated tuner in the Q will support analog. There is a possibility (I am not promising) that you may be able to add your own tuner


Re: Hard drive: We will use a hard drive which is designed to be used in applications such as this. You should expect a similar MTBF to TiVo, Moxi and other STB

WMC Extenders give you a relatively full-featured experience (Guide, scheduling, etc)


At a bare minimum, it will have the same functionality as an Xbox on a plain WMC box.


I can't make any promises, but we understand the concerns associated with control systems

eric, are you saying that as of right now we wouldn't be able to add our own tuner for atsc/ntsc?

Hi Eric,

Are there plans for the integrated tuner in the Q to support ATSC over-the air and if so, how many tuners?

Thanks,
Greg

Actually, no I don't. All I care is the company exists for the life time of the product and offers continous support and improvements on it. In order to do that, the company has to make money on the product in order to survive. Your view seems to be everyone works for free and for the fun of others. That is the definition of you know what.

Anyone know if the Echo will behave as a UPnP Renderer just like MediaCenter on the XBox? I'd like to use a UPnP control point to setup the stream from NAS to the Echo.

You don't have to have your products sold at Best Buy to make money.


My view is that there's plenty of room for small companies to serve niche markets of loyal customers. There are plenty of examples of products that have been successful without having their products sold in stores, in fact quite a number have become successful specifically because they are not sold in stores (and thus don't suffer the pricing overhead) like SV Subwoofers and Outlaw Audio. Slimdevices was quite successful as well without being sold in stores too.

Making it to Best Buy isn't the only definition of successful. SageTV was successful enough to draw the attention of Google.

You need to keep in mind this is a DVR, not a HTPC. You cannot add your own tuners to a Moxi, Tivo, Cisco STB, whatever.

its a DVR running media center, so naturally we expect to be more than just a TiVo. And doesn't the TiVo offer ATSC tuners?

TiVo series 4 also is not capable of tuning ATSC. Obviously, you will be able to attempt to "hack" in your own tuners (though, being Windows Embedded, there may be dependencies for your tuner which could be missing) but if you break it, you own both pieces

I'm not sure some people here understand the market that Windows Embedded goes after - on Windows Embedded devices, Windows itself is typically hidden and you typically don't get explorer, a desktop, etc. This is a DVR, not a general purpose computer.

MSFT 7MC "tries" to stream my full res BD rips to the XB360. It's the XB that seems to be the problem, it chokes when it sees that HD audio and 1080P stream. I don't see any reason an extender can't play this type of content, it's just a function of the device itself having the ability to deal with HD audio and correctly split MKV files.

Oh, on that bent, subtitle in MKV format would be somewhat important as well (don't delay the release for it, but a nice to have if it's easy).

Sure, I have commercial skipping on all my XB360 extenders, it works great! I can't remember the name of all the software, but ShowAnalyzer is one of the components. It puts a file out there with the location of the commercials and then the XB360 just skips them automatically (when watching recorded content). Very nice. Also less than "critical" for me, especially as more and more of my TV is coming from the Internet rather than OTA.

Eric, thanks for all the feedback you've provided so far. After seeing the Engadget podcast it's clear that both of these products are still in development. It seems pretty clear to me that Ceton is going to add in whatever codec and wrapper support they can as long as there are no legal issues involved.

The things that most of us want to see is the ability to stream Blu-Ray and DVD movies to the Echo, whether they're being played on the Q directly or streamed from a server. The ability (or lack thereof) to add ATSC tuners could end up being a dealbreaker for me. My HTPC currently runs two InfiniTV 4's and two Hauppauge 2250's. I record a lot of shows via OTA channels so I'd need ATSC tuners as well as digital cable. Perhaps this could be another add-on product for Ceton to consider? A four-tuner USB ATSC tuner box would go a long way to making this the perfect all-in-one solution for many of us.

FYI - I'm on FIOS and they plan on dumping both my local Fox and CW channels from their lineup so I need ATSC capability in order to receive these channels.

Correct me if I'm wrong...but that's running on the "host" PC, not the extender. The extender is just playing an RDP session from the host. If the host supports it, sure it'll work on an extender, but in this case, the host is a locked down Windows Embedded device....

And my wife would definitely be OK with that. Mostly so would I. I would somewhat miss the disc and BD rip and temp storage capability but I don't backup and archive so not a huge issue for me if it just works with extenders and the price point isn't onerous. WM7 blows away all the other out of the box DVR software even though a few features others offer would be an improvement.

My understanding is the UI is running on something based on RDP but that media (audio/video files) are actually decoded by the extender. So playback support is limited by what the extender can do. Windows 7 made it slightly better by (IIRC) building in transcoding, or maybe it's just container remuxing, but it's still limited by what the extender can do.

kapone was talking about using tools like ShowAnalyzer - programs like that have to run on the Windows Media Center host system (the Q), not the extender (the Echo).

Untrue, the current dual-tuner Tivo S4's (i.e., Premieres) have cable/ATSC tuners. The newest box, the 4-tuner Premiere Elite, only does cable.

We get that Embedded is intended to be a purpose-built DVR. We're just asking for the backdoors to be enabled so we can add whatever we want .
Besides, tuners and plugins are standard features of WMC itself, they're not anything that requires Windows access (other than adding the software, but the tuner drivers can be downloaded automatically after detection).

Also, digital audio out is missing from the Q prototype, will this be added? Every other HD-DVR/extender has this, and it's very useful for older receivers that don't do HDMI.

Will a Windows share be enabled so vids can be transferred to a PC?

Bingo. If you can run that on the Q, sure it'll work on the Extender or alternately if the Echo is paired with a non Q host, and it works like any other Extender, then it'll still work, but that's more to do with the host, rather than the Extender.

The Q preview unit has a digital audio out (shared with analog out) and also has HomeGroup support.

It was my understanding that they were bought for their patents, not their customer base, hardware or even software, which might explain why we haven't heard a peep about it since the acquisition.

I've seen a lot of what's needed for this to go "Mainstream" (here and elsewhere) , and I think that we confuse what we want to see for what most people want. An example of this is codec support. I would bet that the VAST majority of people don't know or care about MKV's, file folder structure or iso's. IMO, they want to be able to take something out of the box, plug it in and have it work. At some point, adding all of the support that we want jacks up the price and makes it less appealing to the mainstream. It's a tricky balance.

Except other tuners may require services, libraries, COM objects, and other things that have been stripped out of the embedded install - there's just too many unknowns to officially support this. I'm not saying we are going to intentionally block it, but I can't see this ever being a supported feature.


As far as I remember, it has digital audio out - where did you see that it does not?

Let me ask this - what do you guys want as far as "backdoors" - I can't make any promises, but if you tell me what you're looking for, I'll see what I can do.

Ok, so no price yet. Has a launch date been given?

from what you're saying about embedded, and because there is no cable in my area, this doesn't sound like its the right product for me. Thanks for asking though.

The Q and the Echo look awesome. I'm already invested in an InfiniTV4 and 4 Linksys extenders, but would ditch the Linkys for Echos if they're reasonable. My question is, will I be able to set my existing InfiniTV 4 into network tuner mode and let a new Q that I would buy pick up those additional tuners and maybe even my old HDHomerun network enabled tuners as well, putting me at the 10 CableCard + 2 ATSC tuner mark?

Not sure how much of this counts as "backdoors", but:

- Support additional Ceton InfiniTV tuners either via USB or shares from other PC's on the network. There are certainly some users who will find that 4 tuners isn't enough.
- Support a limited list of non-cablecard tuners so people can get some combination of ATSC OTA channels and what remains of analog cable channels. Even though it's from the competition, supporting the HD Homerun would seem like an obvious choice for ATSC.
- Support additional storage via eSATA and/or USB and allow the user to transfer music and other WMC supported media to it.

IMHO, support for much beyond that becomes a problem for an embedded system.

Ah, seems my reading comprehension was not working this morning


Way OT, but Jeff has said they're still working on SageTV at Google, and the guide data's guaranteed date has been extended to the end of 2012.


My only point is "successful" and "mainstream" are not necessarily the same thing. Many of the best products are most certainly not mainstream.


Me personally, I just would be looking for expanded tuner support, something that can record HD from Dish or DTV (ie something with HD Component input).

You know it just might be easier for Ceton to provide some of the Q features as a standalone software package to put on top of a standard Windows Media Center installation than to provide a bunch of "backdoors" to enable more flexible tuner configurations. Also, might be a good way to drive more Echo sales. Just a thought...

Although, supporting ATSC/NTSC tuner dongles via the USB2.0 ports may not be a bad idea. Ceton could OEM one and that would be the supported ATSC/NTSC dongle. I think HDHomeruns and the required network connectivity maybe a bit "technical" for something that is meant as a plug-n-play consumer appliance.

I would like to know the answer to this one as well....