Echo as a WMC Extender

[dabretty]

BTW my HTPC setup just received the coveted near 100% WAF since I added commercial skip software to our system! My system is Ceton InfiniTV 6ETH/Echo's (304 FW)/Recorded HDTV/DVRMSToolbox/Comskip. We also really enjoy seamlessly streaming video on vacation via an IPad coupled with a lightening cable outputing HDMI to our Hotel/Condo television. I must thank the TGB community and Ceton for helping me through the trials and tribulation of establishing a reliable HTPC.

Nice to hear you have the (truly coveted) 100% WAF. I couldn't get that here with Recorded HDTV ... we watch too much live content, that it became a bit of a nuisance. (Maybe I should try it again, will see ...)

Did you follow (or do you or anyone else recommend) a tutorial of some sort for setting up the commercial skipping stuff? That is the one aspect of this (WMC) that I have not touched but have thought about. Honestly, our HTPC setup (with 360s and Echos) has been enjoying a very long period of crazy-good stability - probably 18 months since I've had to fiddle with anything. Switching to HDHRP really added stability for us. I'm kind of afraid that I'll jack something up if I dive into the commercial skipping arena, I'm probably at 95% WAF but there can be a lot of hysteresis in that measurement! Maybe I'll make an image of the drive before I try anything.

[RyC]

Commercial skipping works seamlessly with my Echo...now setting it up is another story!

[barnabas1969]

I have 2 echos and an XBox 360 slim. When not watching TV, I leave my echos on (with the streaming stopped) so "boot time" is instantaneous when I turn on the TV and just push PLAY on the remote. I wouldn't dream of leaving my 360 on. Boot time between the two (360 vs echo) from OFF state is about the same. 30-45 seconds or so.

I've enjoyed the echoes as a whole house DVR solution. They are quiet and have a small footprint. Downsides are the interface isn't as "crisp" as the 360. Slight lag in response and animations. They've been more temperamental as far as occasional reboots. There's just no way I'd put a 360 in places I use the echo.

For $100 I'd say it's worth the money, assuming you have the experience I did, which is 99% of the time just great.

I'm up to 4 now as I inadvertently made my DMA extenders useless with my purchase of a Samsung S4. I had 2 echos, so 2 more were added to allow me to retire the DMAs. For what I need them to do, stream Live and Recorded TV, they are a better value at the $99 price tag for me as I don't play console games, I want to minimize the footprint of the device I am using to stream, and I'd like the extender to sip electricity, not chug (older X-Box) or guzzle (newer X-Box).

For those of you wanting to do more, I completely agree go with the XBOXs. Ceton's mistake was over-hyping the Echo to be more than it actually is. If they had simply brought to market a small extender with the current capabilities it has now, bypassed the public beta issue by delaying for a few months, and kept the price in the $129-$159 range, I believe much of the noise we hear now would have never manifested itself.

With that said......help a brother out Ceton who defends you and release an updated firmware, even if it is just to change the bacckground color of the splash screen.

Interesting. My wife is looking at the Samsung S4. We have two Linksys extenders (only one in-use). I plan to replace all of my extenders with XBox 360's... the power consumption isn't a problem for me because even if all four extenders are in use for 4 hours per day, that only amounts to $3.43/month in electricity use ((4extenders * 65watts * 4hours * 30days / 1000watts) * 11centsPerKwH) = $3.43. And, my extenders are used much less than 4 hours per day on average, because we don't use the bedroom TV's nearly as much as we use the living room TV (which is connected directly to the PC).

[MrNorth]

Hi!

I have been using WMC since the days of XP and it is still considered the best solution for our familys needs of media (pictures and tv). However, we wanted to extend this to other rooms, and we borrowed an xbox 360 for a few weeks to try it. We returned the 360 because of

1) The picture quality was not good. The whole picture was like zoomed to 90 % of orignal size, which caused the picture to look blurred compare to the main TV.

2) The IR of the 360 is awful!! We tried many different remotes, but we had to like am directly at the xbox for anything to happen. This has never happened before with any of the electronic remotely controlled devices we have had. WHy the 360 behave this way is very strange... lousy IR-eye maybe?

I recently read up about the Echo, and it looks like a promising product, but I can't quite figure out the status of it. Is it discontinued or are Ceton still shipping firmware updates etc? It feels like Ceton is/was the last hope of keeping WMC alive, but now it feels like they have abandoned it as well? It is very confusing, since I can't find any official info from Ceton... but since they haven't markeded the Echo here in Sweden might indicate that they dont want to put more effort into this product.

I dont want to spend money on a dead product, but if firmware updates are still under development, then it might be worth a shot!

Hopefully Ceton could lease the source code for the netflix plugin, and fix it so it works properly in WMC and on the extender. Pleeeeease!

/S

[cncb]

Your experience with the 360 does not sound typical. By most criteria the Echo is dead. They continue to sell it here in the US but there seem to be no updates of any kind on the way.

[spanner]

Your experience with the 360 does not sound typical. By most criteria the Echo is dead. They continue to sell it here in the US but there seem to be no updates of any kind on the way.

I agree if anything should work as an extender it is the 360, I think I would try to get that working before trying something else. As far as the echo being dead, My linksys are dead yet work just fine extenders, My echos may not see any new development by ceton, but The company is still around and for me they are also working as extenders.

[Limpice]

Your experience with the 360 does not sound typical. By most criteria the Echo is dead. They continue to sell it here in the US but there seem to be no updates of any kind on the way.

I had to update mine two times in the last month. The last update was on 12/28/2013, So they are still pumping out updates for the Echo.


dabretty: You can try looking here http://www.hack7mc.com/2010/04/mcebuddy ... n-wtv.html

[mini__me]

I had to update mine two times in the last month. The last update was on 12/28/2013, So they are still pumping out updates for the Echo.

You'll get everyone excited here if you carry on with talk like that!...I think you may have just had a revert back to a previous version and a re-upgrade rather than new firmware, when you boot what is the firmware version that is shown?

[Madcodger]

OK, after a LOT of work on my WMC HTPC to get things stable, I have had three whole days of using the Ceton Echo (including streaming two movies) that worked well. I can't say I'm out of the woods yet, but do have something that at least appears to be stable. Will plan to report back in future with updates.

[Bill]

Your experience with the 360 does not sound typical. By most criteria the Echo is dead. They continue to sell it here in the US but there seem to be no updates of any kind on the way.

I had to update mine two times in the last month. The last update was on 12/28/2013, So they are still pumping out updates for the Echo.


dabretty: You can try looking here http://www.hack7mc.com/2010/04/mcebuddy ... n-wtv.html

I'm gonna have to say you're mistaken. What firmware is listed at the boot screen?

[Limpice]

Your experience with the 360 does not sound typical. By most criteria the Echo is dead. They continue to sell it here in the US but there seem to be no updates of any kind on the way.

I had to update mine two times in the last month. The last update was on 12/28/2013, So they are still pumping out updates for the Echo.


dabretty: You can try looking here http://www.hack7mc.com/2010/04/mcebuddy ... n-wtv.html

I'm gonna have to say you're mistaken. What firmware is listed at the boot screen?

Well if it did not need to be updated then way would it ask me to update it? I'll have to look and see what framware it's running on right now but it did ask me to update it. I only had mine for a little more then a month now. And the first time i had to update it was when I first got it then one more time on 12/28/2013. Now if I just updated the Echo once in the past month and a half why would I have to reupdate it? It must have been a new update right? I know I'm a little new to the site but I can tell you from a IT's point of view that I'm not mistaken that the last update on my Echo was a new update. Or it just keeps redownloading the same one over and over. But hell I'll look up the firmware version for you some time.

[Bill]

Just because the update was new to you, does not mean it's a new update. If you look around this forum you can see people complaining about no firmware updates since last March.
Firmware Status.
Stable: 2013.304.1657
Beta: 2013.304.1657

Either you're mistaken, or Ceton has not abandoned the Echo and is working on firmware that was mistakenly leaked to you and you alone...

[Dkeyguy1]

Commercial skipping works seamlessly with my Echo...now setting it up is another story!

http://thedigitalmediazone.com/2010/11/ ... ia-center/

[Cryofax]

Regarding "dead products". One has to separate usefulness from ongoing updates etc. A lot of products no longer manufactured or supported can be quite useful for years (especially computer hardware) if given the right TLC by the owner .

I expect my echos to be quite useful long enough to see cable and the current live TV solutions be almost dead and replaced by the continued emergence of ala carte options and cheap streaming. I think when WMC is dead, and thus my echos, I'll be cutting the cable cord for good anyway.

[Limpice]

Yeah I been looking over every thing that has to do with the Ceton, Ceton Echo & the Xbox 360. So far all of it sucks. Nothing can ever be easy when dealing with Microsoft and Third-Party venders. After dealing with computers & other electronics for over three decades I never ran into a product that sucks as much as this one does. And I don't just mean Ceton it self. For example why would Ceton even put a volume button on the remote for the Echo if it don't do shit. Why not make it universal? I just use my XBox360 remote it works just fine on the Echo and I can turn the volume up & down on my TV. Where they just trying to make it as difficult as possible for end users to use it or what? Why does the Echo only Support certain video formats? Why not make it use more then one or two? Why not make it use all of them? I been using a program called Remote Potato to view all my Media from WMC and it works great. I can view any video format I'd like. And it has way less problems and bugs then what I get from using any of the other WMC Extenders. Even the XBox360 sucks for the most part to. It freezes, locks up, crashes most of the time and all the damn restarts suck. Hell I can go on all day talking about what I been through with just WMC it self to. But who has all that much time on their hands... lol I was just looking to find a product that would make my life a little easier. But I wound up finding a program that's going to make me work for it... lol So I say to all of you guys good luck on getting any of it to work great or even at all... lol

[fiteclub]

Yeah I been looking over every thing that has to do with the Ceton, Ceton Echo & the Xbox 360. So far all of it sucks. Nothing can ever be easy when dealing with Microsoft and Third-Party venders. After dealing with computers & other electronics for over three decades I never ran into a product that sucks as much as this one does. And I don't just mean Ceton it self. For example why would Ceton even put a volume button on the remote for the Echo if it don't do poop. Why not make it universal? I just use my XBox360 remote it works just fine on the Echo and I can turn the volume up & down on my TV. Where they just trying to make it as difficult as possible for end users to use it or what? Why does the Echo only Support certain video formats? Why not make it use more then one or two? Why not make it use all of them? I been using a program called Remote Potato to view all my Media from WMC and it works great. I can view any video format I'd like. And it has way less problems and bugs then what I get from using any of the other WMC Extenders. Even the XBox360 sucks for the most part to. It freezes, locks up, crashes most of the time and all the damn restarts suck. heck I can go on all day talking about what I been through with just WMC it self to. But who has all that much time on their hands... lol I was just looking to find a product that would make my life a little easier. But I wound up finding a program that's going to make me work for it... lol So I say to all of you guys good luck on getting any of it to work great or even at all... lol

Good luck getting remote potato to work with protected content. BTW, my Echo works just fine.

[Crash2009]

Just because the update was new to you, does not mean it's a new update. If you look around this forum you can see people complaining about no firmware updates since last March.
Firmware Status.
Stable: 2013.304.1657
Beta: 2013.304.1657

I have 2 Echo's. One is unavailable at the moment. My reliable Echo is running firmware 2013.320.1349... I don't remember exactly how I ended up with that firmware. As I recall, I was kinda selective about which firmware I was going to allow, so, I had updates turned off on both. Then, as new firmwares became available, I only allowed one Echo at a time to move forward (or backwards, depending upon your experience) 2013.320.1349 is not even listed. http://www.thegreenbutton.tv/forums/vie ... =69&t=4291 2013.320.1349 might be the one that was recalled, and if you had updates turned on, 1349 was taken away from you and replaced with 1657. Here is todays screen cap, just to prove I'm not blowing smoke..........

B.T.W. 304 represents March 4th, and 320 is March 20. Both firmwares were released in March 2013.

[IownFIVEechos]

How did you get a ceton copyright 2014 update on that web screen?????

[Crash2009]

How did you get a ceton copyright 2014 update on that web screen?????

It's just the way it is. No special trick.

What year does yours say?

[IownFIVEechos]

I will have to check, but common sense would say that no communication between updates would lead to a 2013? The web page is sitting on the echo I think? They would have had to push something down no? In March 2013 they would not have stamped it 2014??? Did you update the software app recently?