Ceton Echo - Windows Media Center Extender

I was torn between giving this product 4 or 5 stars, but decided to go with 5 to help bring up its average star rating as much as possible, because at THIS point in its development it deserves a good rating. I know it had issues early on, but from my experience with the current firmware, it now works 100% as advertised with a bright future ahead of it. I run one these with an X-Box 360 extender at the same time off a modest HTPC (2.4ghz Dual Core, 4gb RAM, GeForce 210, InfiniTV4, 250gb OS Drive + 3TB Media Drive) and it works flawlessly. Both it and the 360 extender stream the video and audio as well as the local HTPC WMC does to its own monitor. I plan on adding a 2nd echo to the setup. The HTPC, which is also used as a normal PC and still doesn't break a sweat running this, should handle it fine. The package it arrived in is very nice. A well designed box with all the cables you need (Power, HDMI, Ethernet). The unit is small and nice looking but with just enough heft to not feel cheap. It was found and connected to my WMC in a snap, and also did its own firmware update in a couple minutes and was ready to go after I installed the setup program on the WMC (make sure you download this from Ceton and apply it so you can tweak your echo's settings). The remote, which includes 2 lithium batteries, is passable. A bit small and as of this writing doesn't do volume on the extender. But most people can and should get a universal remote to consolidate the remote codes for this, the TV, and whatever else is in your HTPC setup. It will definitely help your wife acceptance factor by a lot. Response and execution were crisp. The UI animations (sliding from menu option to menu option) had a slightly lower framerate than the XBox or local PC, but still move and respond just as fast. The forthcoming android support will double this device's usefulness, but there are other ways to get your netflix/hulu etc if it doesn't come to pass. This is the only device currently sold new outside the XBox 360 that can act as an extender for windows media center, and it uses much less power than a 360 and works brilliantly. Highly recommended and looking forward to more updates!

Update: I'm about a year on from ditching the Ceton and I can't believe how 'night and day' it is. The regular/daily issues mentioned below just all 'went away' and I haven't seen any of them since. I'm also back to running flawlessly with the virus killer of my choice. I'm still using the same server too. It's a real pity Ceton seemed focused on trying to blame whatever wasn't their own part of the setup rather than accepting flaws with their own hardware. Original review: It did work for me, but not without numerous issues both with the unit itself and with Ceton support. I fixed all the issues by ditching the unit and replacing it with an Xbox 360. Yes, merely changing the extender resolved everything, therefore clearly (and contrary to Ceton's customer support claims) all the issues were squarely with the Echo unit. I list a summary of some of my most common problems so you can judge yourself whether they're reasonable or not for you: -Trouble re-connecting to the server, usually after the Ceton Echo had locked up and rebooted. So yes...two problems there. -Frequent lock ups/freezes on pressing pause while viewing content (sometimes with rewind/fast forward). -Lock ups just navigating menus, or even just being sat in the menus - not even playing video. -Lock ups would about 50/50 require you to pull the plug on the Ceton unit to re-start. At other times, the unit would reset after sometime, either a crash itself or a less than graceful recovery method. and it is also reasonable to give you information that will lead you to your own judgment about whether or not the Ceton Echo was at fault: -None of these problems were apparent on the Xbox 360 being used for the same purpose in a different room during the same time period I owned the Echo. I could use the 360 as the Echo was experience these problems and the 360 would be free of issue. -None of these problems were apparent on the Xbox 360 that replaced the Ceton Echo in the living room. None of these problems were apparent on an additional Xbox 360 added to another remote TV. -Server, both hardware and software and the cable company hardware did not change as I went from 'broken with Ceton's hardware included in my setup' to 'fully resolved with no Ceton'. -Update: None of these problems have been apparent on a 360 installed in the same place as the Ceton Echo...same network cable, same splitter, same TV. Either the Ceton Echo was to blame or all these issues magically fixed themselves at the point I unplugged the Echo and returned it. I had it for six months - this was not a short trial. I am very lucky Amazon accepted a return at this point. My server PC (for the record) was a dedicated media server (minimal software installed just to do the job). It could be summed up as Windows 7/Media center with a virus killer, a torrent client, the serviio media server and HD Homerun prime drivers/plug-ins. Anything else installed on the machine was merely to set it up. It is still this way today. Ceton were utterly terrible to deal with as far as customer support goes. I did everything they asked, stopping short at applying some hotfixes that were (a) unrelated and (b) what Microsoft told me not to apply (due to them not being related). Ceton were unable to find any problem (or at least denied it) despite all logic reasonably pointing to the Ceton unit being at fault. Most of what I was asked to do was nothing other than groping around in the dark and at the point where I told them I was not comfortable with applying the unrelated hotfixes (which I was polite about and decent enough to explain/justify) they simply closed the thread. The attitude was 'we don't care about your concerns, if you won't do what we asked, we won't help' with no explanation or justification, which they had been invited to provide. They were simply unwilling to honor a request to proceed and work with my in a manner I was comfortable with and they not were willing to justify themselves. I ended up speaking with their Director of Corporate Development. More on support...If you have any virus killer installed and it's not Microsoft Security Essentials they'll tell you to uninstall it and point out they only play nicely with that product, which is what they 'recommend'. This product is free and is among the lowest rated virus killers (in terms of protection) around and it has now fallen into the status of repeatedly failing the minimum certification level...which was somewhat intentional on the part of Microsoft as they have been developing the product as 'a baseline' for other vendors to develop their own virus products against. This being your only supported virus killer is simply 'unacceptable'. Software should be developed to work well with common and popular virus killers - all too common it isn't. Ceton clearly fall into this now unfortunately common 'you have an unsupported virus killer on your system' scenario and it becomes one of the default line items in the support response regardless of whether or not it is causing or even related to an issue. Which does bring me to another topic. In order to get a view of your computer (to see which virus killer and other things Ceton doesn't like that you installed) Ceton's Support workflow asks you to run a program that dumps a lot of information out for them. This is common and not an issue, provided it is not intrusive. I made the mistake of having a detailed look at the information captured only after I'd uploaded it, trusting it nothing unnecessary was going to be probed. That was a mistake. At the level this reports information to Ceton, this program falls into the Spyware category. My recommendation: You might be able to tolerate these even frequent issues on a remote TV in another room that you maybe don't use all the time, however given the Xbox 360 pricing remains quite competitive (and with deals, is often cheaper) I would be hard pushed to truly recommend the Ceton Echo unit unless it's in a flash sale and is substantially discounted.