Official Ceton Echo Extender Info Thread - Page 2

So then the question is, will you get the "full" Echo media format experience with a 7MC box or is that something special in the Q.

If this is the first non-Xbox extender client to support Live/Recorded TV in H264/MPEG4 then Hurray!

If it supports European 1080/50i, 720/50p and 576/50i MPEG2 and H264 (and AAC audio as well as AC3 and MP2) then Hurray again. There's a great market for it over here (where we have easier access to satellite pay-TV on our Media Center PCs)

Mkv support and media browser and these things could be epic. Well lets see the price first I guess.

I want the echo, like yesterday.

CETON: SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY!

Yeah if it does that, I'm not sure I care what the price is (well within reason, say <$500)

Certainly the product is still in development, but keep in mind this is designed to be a turnkey device, not a fully customizable PC. To put the question into perspective, it would be like asking TiVo if you can attach an HD-PVR.
Of course, you could always format the machine and just use the hardware + your own Windows license.

Oh, I fully understand, I wasn't really expecting it (the Q) to support the HD PVR, and really, I don't even care (sorry, don't mean that to sound harsh, it's that the Echo is more interesting to me than the Q).

Just as a bit of background, (and I'll try and keep this short) I'm a Dish subscriber and use an HD PVR, and R5000 or Collossus for capture. Currently I use SageTV on a PC for the backend and SageTV extenders for the frontend. This setup gives me all the TV, plus Blu-ray, DVD, MKV, etc at each TV with one device and a single UI.

Given that SageTV has been suspended (if not killed by Google entirely) I've been on the hunt for a replacement. WMC seems by far to be the closest replacement DVR function wise, but their limited extenders and lack of PC clients makes it impossible for me to replicate what I have now, that being TV+videos (DVD/BD/MKV) with one device/UI. I've got a "lot" of fellow SageTV users in the same pickle.

So the announcement of the Q+Echo is very interesting, primarily IMO because it sounds like your Echo extender will finally break through the "silly" limitations of WMC when it comes to multi-room capabilities (ie only works with extenders and extenders suck for media).

If the Q supported USB tuners like the HD PVR that would be icing, but if just the Echo supports (as someone above said) MyMovies/MediaBrowser and DVD, BD, and/or MKV, then it's probably the biggest news to hit the WMC world cablecard (which as a Dish user doesn't help me) and you will open WMC up to a lot of SageTV users. I know personally, if I can build a WMC machine with my HD PVR/Collosus/R5000, and the Echo supports MKVs and MM/MediaBrowser, I'd be interested in one for sure (for evaluation) and likely at least two to fill out my system.

Gorgeous looking device and drool-worthy specs!

Eric, your participation in these forums and over on TGB would have been the primary reason that I'd buy your CableCARD product, were it not for TWC's horrific policies regarding 5c and headache inducing Cisco TAs.
Thank you for stepping up in this very fickle community and participating one-to-one at an end user level.

I am liking what I see, a lot. The Xbox is a loud machine and hopefully this will cure that issue. I think extenders are just now coming into their own, everyone got out of the game to soon. I'm liking what I'm seeing but it's going to have to be cost competitive with the Xbox 360, I'm not paying a fortune for an extender when just basic hardware is all that needs to be in it. Now the Q is a different story, I can see a much higher price tag on it. Come on Ceton! I'm moving next month and will actually have to start using that noisy Xbox, get it released!

The Xbox360 Slim is not a loud machine. It makes a small amount of noise (more than a Tivo) but you really can't hear it at normal volume levels.

It's probably the best extender but it sucks for playback of anything other than live or recorded TV and it draws too much juice to leave on all the time, so if the Echo can handle a wide variety of video formats with low power draw it would indeed be a great improvement.

I certainly hope it is much less than that. At that high of a pricepoint for the Echo they are going to really limit thier sales to people on this forum for the most part. I do not know many people that are going to drop $500 per location for a streaming Device. Hacked apple TV2, Roku etc while they have limitations are MUCH less expensive, even a new in box XBOX slim is way less than half that amount..

Being more specific hardware, not having to game, etc and no drive I am hoping it is under the current xbox pricing someplace.

Yea this machine when paired against a Tivo looks fantastic.

However I wouldn't be surprised at all to see shortcomings for us HTPC fanatics.

But again I'm sure a ton of small hacks and mods would make it near 100% ideal.

Yeah ~500 is insane, it needs to compete with the 360, roku, appletv, boxee etc imo so more than 150$ would be overpriced imo. Around 100 would be ideal.

limitations are a much bigger issue to me than price...

I don't think $500 for this device is insane.

Almost a year ago people were buying Ceton tuners for $400 or more. Now they are $200-ish when on sale. Add that to the cost of a HTPC. My low budget small bedroom build went something like this:

Case + PSU: Habey 600b around $75
CPU: Intel G620T $80
Memory: 2gb about $20
SSD: Zalman 64gb $108

PLUS a blu ray player and a 6 tuner version of the card I bought last spring. Also the 2TB drive inside of it nowadays would run for more than the SSD I bought. Around $150 I would think.

It actually is a great value.

And it's a closed off system that SHOULD work better than the HTPC's we like to tinker around with

Unfortunately, I can't change TWC's CCI policies, but we've actually gotten their TA to work pretty reliably - I use out product with TWC at home, too.

Are you talking about the echo or the Q?

aren't you missing a mobo in this calculation? what about a windows license?

imo, $500 for an extender is still better than building a pc for each tv. this was why the $150 sage extenders were such a fantastic device.

I think if the Echo could play back Bluray/DVD folder structure and ISO's then this is well worth $200-$300. At that point it's not really competing with the Roku or Apple TV, it's now competing with Popcorn Hour and Dune. If it also can have all the streaming stuff too (i.e. Netflix, Amazon Prime...) then it's worth that extra cost.

Correct. I wrote that up too fast

I see I may have read a bit too fast, didn't realize there are two devices. So the echo is the smaller of the two?

I essentially saw a price tag and the device specs. Oops.

yep. that is what we are discussing in this thread.

Gotcha. So that little one is at $500. Now I am getting it.

Yea that is a bit much. I'd pay round 200-250 for that...Not much to that device.

I would bet that there is a large cost for being able to use an embedded windows.

But who knows, maybe like the Ceton cards dropped in price in a relatively short amount of time this will too.

no. we have no idea what they plan on charging for the extender. one posted commented that they would be willing to pay up to $500 per extender. While I agree on principle, it would be a hard pill for me to swallow since I had paid $150 per extender for almost exactly the same thing.

However if it can't play dvd and bd folder structures natively, I'm not interested.

Very excited about the Echo (as i've build a HTPC already), but the Q looks VERY awesome too.

It would seem reasonable to assume we'll see much better hardware (faster/non-sluggish UI) and better filetype support in the Echo.

However, is it possbile to hope that a Netflix plugin (or a variant of it) would be available via the Echo in the native media extender format? As in not using with the Q but existing HTPC running WMC7?

Or is providing any plugins as such just not possible in the typical media extender format? Whereas it may be possible when connected to the Q?

Just going to point out that the $500 I said was just a comment on the value to me for such a device, given that there is absolutely nothing else on the market that can provide TV and media (DVD/BD/MKV) to multiple rooms. Well, aside from an HTPC in each room running some experimental-at-best DVR software.

Realistically it can be done for as little as $150 (SageTV did), but I think anywhere up to $250 would not be "insane", though yeah, even if it was $500, personally I would probably get a couple.

Yeah 150-250 seems reasonable. Of course I would prefer to see it @$99.99, who does not want it as cheap as possible. I think in the 150-250 range Ceton will open up a MUCH larger market of users than if it was higher. I know I would buy 2 right now if it was available and <$250.

I wish we at least had a rough ETA. with my HTPC up and running I am quickly approaching (aka at) the point of buying a 1st extender.

Just a thought, maybe you could put a bug in someone's ear to build in an "expert mode" where those of us who are adventurous could log in as administrators and install our own drivers (I've not played with Windows Embedded to know exactly how that works) for extra hardware. The Q's form factor looks pretty cool.

Any information on how the custom skins will work?

I'm all for excitement, but do we even know what hardware it's running? What is everyone basing their price speculation on?

No, I don't think any details have been provided yet.


SWAG's.

Seriously, there really isn't enough information about the product yet for any of us to have a good idea of what it's worth. That value might change radically once we know things like exactly what media formats are supported, what it has for horsepower, how responsive the UI is, how good the video output quality is, etc. Some people certainly have a maximum amount of money they'd be willing to pay regardless of some of the answers, but the product may cost more to manufacture than some are willing to pay and we can't reasonably expect Ceton to sell it at a loss .