Official Ceton Echo Extender Info Thread - Page 198  

Silver is free and iirc allows you full access to marketplace. I don't pay for gold and I get all updates no problems. If the content is free silver is good enough.

http://www.xb360info.com/xbox/xbox-live/110

Yeah, thats the issue, no Netflix or gaming.

Thanks, though. I didn't know you could do that. Nice to know.


EDIT: Mario - Thanks that is great info!

The only issue is if you are a gamer, then you can't really have both accounts? or can you? ...
Edited by skybolt - 2/16/13 at 8:50pm

This is what bothers me also. They totally skip over questions, rather than face up and answer them. Before the launch of the InfiniTV4 they were part of the community, and even a whiles after. But at some point they decided to just be friendly to certain people, and ignore question by others for outstanding issues.

I'll mention two:

1) Line of pixel issue that was reproduced by them, never to be spoken about publicly again. I've had an open support ticket for probably a year or 2 now.
2) Windows 8 support for the echo. Tell us where you are with it.

For issue 1, I've moved on to SiliconDust. At least they have forums and answer questions. For issue 2 I think I'll be returning my echo some time next week. It hasn't even closely met any of the hype from when they announced the project. For the little it can do it is way overpriced.

I suppose we should have asked the question.. "why aren't they testing the Echo themselves before they release it to PAYING beta testers?"

Oh well, I suppose I can't complain too much. I've spent $$$ on other crazy devices which were SUPPOSED to get video from my computer to my TV. And the Echo DID expose me to what an extender can do, which led me to buy an XBox. I've barely scratched the surface of what it can do.

And speaking of the XBox... mine is practically silent. The only time I hear it is when a game disc is spinning in the drive. But I just got mine - so it's a new model.

You can't have both on the same gamer tag, but we have guest accounts set up on our XBOX's for people that come over and want to play. They are all live silver accounts. If you were to let your XBOX Live Subscription lapse it would automatically turn into a Free Live Silver Account. Once you pay it would be Gold again.

Exactly.

Every time I look there it only shows $59 off. Where do you see $79?

It was only a one day sale apparently.

Thanks but that's when I looked.

My mom, right after my father died, put a TV in the kitchen so she's hear and see people talking while she ate. And don't say we kids should eat dinner with her every night. You don't know my Mom's sense of independence.

Perfect.. Once every few weeks is enough I think.

That was copied and pasted from a facebook post by Ceton.

I didn't look at it on Newegg, so I couldn't tell you any details, but I suspect maybe you were looking at an individual item and not the combo, maybe?

She sounds like a wonderful person

My point was that TV in the kitchen is not whats driving WMC + entender. It's not a significant usage scenario for this platform. My neighbor has a small TV in the kitchen to quickly catch the local news & weather in the morning but it's fed from a simple coax split. It's not part of their custom whole home AV/TV system. That system is for the LR, HT, and BDRM's.

Bedrooms are for things other than watching TV.

A "simple coax split" won't work for everyone as it requires either an antenna connection, a cable box, or a built-in QAM tuner AND a cable system that has the channels the person wants in that room available to that QAM tuner. I have a friend at work who has a TV in his kitchen that's currently hooked up to an XBOX that he's just using as an extender - he's been waiting for something like the Echo to come along so he can go with a smaller, cooler running solution. The WHOLE point of the WMC + Extender platform is to be able to watch live TV, recorded TV, and whatever else is available on the WMC box in any room you want in the house using the centralized WMC to handle everything. It's really irrelevant if that room is the family room, a bedroom, a kitchen, a workout room, a TV located outside at the pool, or even a bathroom (yes, I've heard of people installing TV's in their bathrooms).

Reading this thread, it has become apparent to me that there is a wide range of hardware setups, software and uses of entertainment. I personally never watch t.v. in the bedroom and agree with Sammy2, but I know a lot of people who do watch t.v. in the bedroom. My wife is a lifelong cook as a home maker and professional, the kitchen can be a place where she spends much of the night with friends visiting and cooking. An HD t.v. with sound bar and a WMC Extender is used heavily in the room for video and audio. I would never consider using an Extender with it's severe limitations on my main t.v. but some in this forum think just the opposite. I do not think you can generalize about usage of Extenders.

Well put.

I wouldn't want to be handling the TV remote in there...

Sounds like the perfect use case for gesture-based controls using Kinect, because who doesn't want video cameras pointed at them in the bathroom!

Or I guess you could try voice recognition.

Nope, it was the combo

It is a $300 combo right now.. USB tuner and echo.

It seems this topic is dying...

Not much to talk about until there's a new f/w release and there's only a week left in the extended return period for beta testers and/or early adopters. Mine is doing quite fine actually and I'm pretty positive that it will do even more very soon. Some do not share in my optimism though..

I was holding out for announcement/update, but my patience ran out. I just dropped off my Echo at the UPS Store, so I expect to see a "State of the Echo #3" update today or tomorrow with some exciting news.

Good luck.

Yeah the announcement will probably be the immediate availability of unlimited numbers of $49.95 tested open box units witth 30 day warranites.

If anyone is bored by the current lack of news, let me say I finally got around to changing my commercial-skipping software.

I was using VideoReDo's system before. I switched to DVRMSToolbox, Comskip and DTBAddin to try out marking the commercials without actually cutting the commercials.

After limited testing, I am dubious whether this is better than simply using the 30-second forward skip and 10-second backward skip on the media remote.

Too bad and I really don't think that there's going to be any $50 open box units so don't hold your breath.

I've got a new discussion, I've noticed since hooking up my Ceton Echo that my HTPC starts and stops about 20 new processes in the Task Manager at about 30-60 second intervals, including a 2nd Ehshell.exe. The 2nd Ehshell.exe shows a good amount of processor power at times hitting 30-50% and peaking the processor being used to 100% at times. This also coincides with the fact that I've been sporadically seeing video stutters at about the same 30-60 second rate when viewing on my main TV where the HTPC resides and displays. A reboot fixes the stutter. I already have a reboot scheduled for every morning at 4am so it never goes a day without rebooting. So I can't use that as a work-around at this point.

Why would the Echo cause so many processes to start plus why would they open and close like that? Especially the Ehshell.exe, I can understand why it runs a 2nd instance because it's needed but why would they just keep starting and stopping?

What f/w are you using?