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Extender Market Far From Gone - Chris Lanier's Blog

Extender Market Far From Gone

A few posts going around today by Thomas Hawk and Ed Bott in specific about Media Center Extenders, all centered around Tim Coyle's HP Media Center Extender review and Matt Goyer's post on the HP Extender being discontinued.  The market is there, the product is not!

 

As Thomas points out “Why would you buy a crappy extender today that can't stream HDTV to your new HDTV bedroom TV (is anyone really buying non HDTVs anymore?) when you know that one that can is very shortly due out on the market AND it can play XBox games as well?”

 

I would like to add that the market for Extenders will boom if Microsoft can get it right.  The Xbox 360 should be a great Extender, in addition to a fantastic gaming console.  Whatever the price point of the Xbox 360 (I think the latest word is around $300) a $100 Extender would be huge!  I can see many more people going the Extender route if the price wasn't so high.  How many homes that currently have Media Center PC have more then a single TV?  The other thing that has to change is format support, Microsoft has to face the fact that we have more then just Windows Media Video on our hard drives.

 

Again, there isn’t much that needs to change, but the things that do are deal breakers for a large percent of people who would purchase one today and tomorrow.

  • Extenders that support streaming HDTV (MPEG-2, MPEG-4, and WMV)
  • Extenders that support streaming MPEG-4 (DivX, XviD, AVC, etc)
  • Extenders that support playback of DVDs (VIDEO_TS Folders)
  • Extenders around the $100 price point
Published Tuesday, June 14, 2005 3:03 PM by chrisl
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Comments

# re: Extender Market Far From Gone

Don't forget Supporting more than 2 tuners in the MCE box itself.

Right now I don't have any extenders and I run into recording and viewing conflicts all the time. If I had extenders I think it would be hopeless with the 2 tuners I have now.

*I know about the hack but I don't care to impliment it if more tuner could be utilized by default.*

Tuesday, June 14, 2005 3:42 PM by chrisl

# re: Extender Market Far From Gone

Media Center 2005 supports dual NTSC tuners out of the box.

Conflict Resolution for me works great with my 2 tuners, when there is a confliect, Media Center tells me and ask what I really want to record.

Tuesday, June 14, 2005 3:54 PM by chrisl

# re: Extender Market Far From Gone

I agree that there is a market for the extenders - in fact I don't think Media Center will make it in the long run without extenders. But the Xbox 360 isn't going to be perfect - it won't be shipping with a HD DVD drive and I wonder how streaming HDTV is going to work on people's networks

Tuesday, June 14, 2005 9:01 PM by chrisl

# re: Extender Market Far From Gone

I'd buy an extender right now if I could, but being in the UK I have no choice. Europe - second class citizen as far as Microsoft is concerned.

Wednesday, June 15, 2005 3:04 AM by chrisl

# re: Extender Market Far From Gone

Paying $300 for an extender box is far too much - a DVD player can be had for < $50. EVERY extender needs to be able to playback DVDs.

Wednesday, June 15, 2005 10:47 AM by chrisl

# re: Extender Market Far From Gone

"Media Center 2005 supports dual NTSC tuners out of the box.

Conflict Resolution for me works great with my 2 tuners, when there is a conflict, Media Center tells me and ask what I really want to record."

Yes, I know, that's why I said "MORE than 2 tuners" I need MORE than 2.

Yes the Conflict Resolution works good, but it gets old when I have to mitigate a conflict several times a night when attempting to watch live TV. Basically in my house between the hours of 6pm and 10pm week nights, I regularly have 2 shows scheduled to record and a third and sometimes a forth that some one in the house would like to watch/record.

Now, if I had a couple extenders, I could conceivably need 5 tuners. 1 for each extender, 2 tuners too keep the recording function I have now, and 1 more for live TV on the MCE box itself.

Wednesday, June 15, 2005 3:17 PM by chrisl

# re: Extender Market Far From Gone

I totally agree with Tim. I grudingly use Media Center because it is more robust than more open solutions like SageTV. However, SageTV allows client PCs to play media off of the server seemlessly. In order to play media off of an MCE PC server on an MCE "client", you have to hack the daylights out of the server and client!

MCE just won't fly in multi-TV households without the long rumored "SoftSled".

Saturday, June 18, 2005 10:09 AM by chrisl

# re: Extender Market Far From Gone

Extenders that know they need to support Myth TV as well as Media center :). Or can at least be reimaged to support Myth.

Seriously though, HD support is critical, but so parental protection. Right now Windows Media center really lacks the ability for to protect and hide video files from kids. It has some base level protection for TV related stuff and that is all. I should be able to set pin access control on every module (music, video's, TV whatever) and at every folder level on each module and have that be respected by all extenders.

-Griffon

Monday, June 20, 2005 7:00 PM by chrisl