Official Ceton Echo Extender Info Thread - Page 171

As of the date and time of publication of that web page. There may be f/w updates to change this but ceton has to get it functional in Win7 first. This is not to say that it ever will work in Win8; I think I recall ceton stating somewhere that it wouldn't though.

I read this thread and wonder how much self-deception we are capable of. Ceton is a long way from making the Echo work as it should with 7. It has made publice statements that it will not support Win 8 with the Echo.. Folks need to get a grip!

As they say in the NFL "Come on Man!"

There is no self deception on my part. I never said the Echo will work with Windows 8.

Where? I haven't seen this and believe me I have been watching closely.
Edited by crbaldwin - 1/18/13 at 1:33pm

I think I have a grip ^^^

What ever happened of getting the Android platform on the Echo?

They left coal in your stocking.

That's actually ESPN's C'Mon Man segment and not the NFL

I have never seen public statements about Win8 prior to seeing that tweet published today. In fact, they have stated over on TGB that they were looking at getting it to work with Win8 but that was awhile back so it's possible that has changed.

This plus a million...

Look, Microsoft has no reason to want any other extenders than their 360's/720's interfacing with their OS. If I were them I'd be doing the same thing. They want you to purchase THEIR products not 3rd party extenders.

Ceton is going to have to develop their own DVR software just like SageTV did in order for the Echo to even have the smallest impact on the HTPC market. This is what they need to be focusing and not on half-baked Android support that was talked about a month ago now.

Although you are correct in saying this, it is what anti-trust stuff is all about. The problem here is that it affects such a small percentage of Windows users that there will be little momentum to have it dealt with, unlike the issue with IE being embeded into the OS in such a way that other browsers couldn't function. That affected all users of Windows so was more prominent. Unfortunately for Ceton, M$ would rather that they die than compete with their Xbox. The only way out is for ceton to develop a DVR but that could be done in android or directly in linux too.

This isn't anti-competitive. This is killing a product slowly. I'm sure when Ceton licensed the W7 extender code that MS stated there was no future support for it. However, we will never know this.

If this was such a huge and expanding market then why did all the other extender vendors - HP, Linksys, DLink, kill their products years ago?

You can't claim anti-competition when there's no market for a product. I bet Ceton's plan all along was for MCE to be added to Win8 embedded so they would have an extender and DVR. Since MS did not add MC to embedded that killed their DVR plans. With the Echo partly developed they probably thought their could recoup their costs just selling it for Win7 users.
Edited by almostinsane - 1/18/13 at 5:40pm

I think they killed their product years ago because nobody knew what it was. The earlier extenders warts and all were ahead of their time. If cable tuners were readily available and the morons designing and marketing WMC extenders were not trying to market them as wireless devices then things might have been different. It just wasn't common to have hardwired ethernet TV side years ago. Running the devices wireless on G WiFi was a prescription for a very bad user experience.

True. The media center team @ MS was disbanded years ago.

The Media Center Home Integrator alliance was killed years ago as well.

I live in the middle of Softieland Although I am not a member of the club per se ,I just have many, many friends who work at the place. Quite a lot of them are audio/video enthusiast and own the Ceton Tuner cards and use them often. I also have a friend who is at the highest level of the XBox team and all will verify WMC stopped receiving practically any funding a number of years ago, The WHS fiasco and subsequent move to the Server group further destroyed the whole home conquering plan Windows originally envisioned with WMC and WHS. Then we got Home Mesh net to further hose it all up.

During all this time, X-Box kept growing, winning market share and most importantly "monetizing" the XBox experience for Microsoft. WMC failed miserably to do this. So, what is my point. The victors in the living room are the X-Box team. They have little intention of opening up the X-Box to competiitors. They intend to continue to get paid for content on the box. There is no internal second opinion to do otherwise from a valid succesful internal team. Look to see a new X-Box lite that may well offer WME functionality. Expect more services and fees from X-Box Live. As a score card, my friend on the X-Box team by far has the nicest, house, car, toys of any of the other guys I know who work their. He won the living room. Windows team lost!!!

I have several friends who worked on Microsoft's pre I-Phone touch tablet computing platform. They thought it would change the world. About the time Apple came storming into touch mobile devices they disbanded all these teams. Now, guess what, touch Win 8 is all the rage. Microsoft has a culture of competing internally with each other. Great concepts get crushed, weak but profitable stuff often gets a green light. It is a known cultural weakness of the firm. Internal competition does not always lead to the best ideas succeeding; just the loudest and money making.

So, Ceton is working with what it's got (An internal team at MSFT that is losing). The final chapter is never written at Microsoft and I too share all these concerns. For me, I am rebuilding my primary HTPC with all new guts and all based on Win 7. I am using a ton of Linksys WME's and will not change for now. My primary HTPC is getting a new Core I7, 32GB of RAM, Ramdisk for some rendering, a new SATA III Hard Drive and 12 TB of Raid. It is on the test bench now..

In the future, my guess is we may all own little X-Box lites if we choose to stick with an WMC type platform. OTH if Ceton does fire up a central tuner box, I might just go that route some day.

Stay happy and I will continue to monitor this thread for improvements.

I was having issues with AC-3 bitstreaming using native video mode. After unplugging the HDMI cable from my AVR so I could go direct to my TV for some testing I plugged the echo back into the AVR. I have AC-3 bitstreaming working in native video mode now. It must have been one of those lame EDID things. The picture is fantastic and the audio is as well.

Now waiting for full mkv support of high/variable bit rate files with HD Audio!!!! Is this going to happen? I sure hope so.

Yeah, EDID is a real pain. How is your audio sync? Mine is horrible.

It was perfect. Now I shut dowm my system and brought it back up and the echo gave me the green monster so I rebooted it and them my audio disappeared. Again. Time to pull it out of the system and connect it to the TV it is going to be connected to. We'll see.

This morning it is working quite swimmingly again. I am pretty positive this is an issue with EDID and power up sequence on my end but it would be nice if the echo could remember the system it is connected to like the Gefen HDMI Detective or Tulli's EDID over-rides.

On a similar note: Sometimes I notice obvious de-interlacing errors.

Sometimes it works very cleanly.

Sometimes scrolling tickers are smooth; sometimes they jump as they scroll.

Frustrating.

I don't see that, probably because I rarely watch stuff with scrolling tickers. I hate programming with that because it is a distraction even when it is smooth. Then again it is all about distraction these days! (FoxNEWS)

Back to the echo, I am not having issues with de-interlacing at all. My picture is clean and stutter free.

Firmware?

2013.116.1545.

2012.1228.1447

No newer updates available on the beta channel for me.

Any word on fixing the preview window bug?

Best yet....

It is omega. It works well and will probably roll to beta or stable even soon.

The way I see it ceton needs to work out EDID issues and then we'll be on the way to dealing with mkv's and/or android. I'm keeping mine.

Would you be willing to download a 17MB file to see if you can see the same non deinterlacing I see?

https://skydrive.live.com/redir?resid=CEBAA15A6CFAA508!1978&authkey=!AHqREBzb_yzdyTI

I hope that worked...

The short video segment plays fine on HTPC, but on the Echo? fuggedaboutit.

BTW, I do NOT have the latest Omega firmware you have.

They looked almost the same to me but can you upload maybe a minute clip rather than a 15 second clip?

lol, what future in that strategy?

Win7 does everything I need for HTPC use and PC use as well for that matter.

How long will it be sold? Might as well stock up. Oh wait already did that.