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Transcoding for the Ceton Echo


walshy002000

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walshy002000

Hi Everyone,

 

So I'm looking into getting a Ceton Echo as a little unit to replace a 360, but from what I've read it's picky about codec support (not surprisingly given the lack of power in the unit). According to the specs (http://cetoncorp.com/products/echo/) it only supports H.264, whereas my media is a mix of everything, and until now I've been using Shark007 codec to handle non WMC native formats (i.e. MKVs).

 

Since a lot of my media is local and not just live/recorded TV, does anyone know if MediaBrowser can transcode everything to H.264 on the fly for my so I can play it all on the Echo? Or even better, is anyone using an Echo with MB3 and different formats?

 

Cheers,

Walshy

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JeremyFr79

I don't have an Echo, had looked into them but reading reviews I see more people unhappy with them than happy with them.  I'd say just stick with the 360.

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christoph86

I have an echo and I wouldn't recommend it for anything other than live tv. It suffers from zero support from ceton and stutters a lot even with recommended codec and containers. The last firmware update was a year ago even though there are many known issues. Seems its left for dead. Unfortunate, had they put a better processor in it, it would be a good product and would have supported Android, but it doesn't.

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Redshirt

That's a shame. Several users on the forum had high hopes for the Ceton hardware. 

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gcw07

That's a shame. Several users on the forum had high hopes for the Ceton hardware. 

Yeah I was one of those people that had high hopes for a single interface on all my tv's that I could watch my collection of movies and tv along with live tv. Unfortunately that didn't work out very well. I've moved back to Tivo instead of sticking with WMC for live TV and extenders.

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Redshirt

Well if everything falls into place for you, you'll still get your single interface :)

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gcw07

Well if everything falls into place for you, you'll still get your single interface :)

Well yeah single interface (that actually works 100% of the time on all my tv's) for live tv and recordings. Not so much for my personal collection of media at the moment. But I can live with that as I don't think the dream of a single interface for all is going to happen anytime soon.

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smokey7722

Yea the echo works great for live tv, but there is very limited support for local media playback.  I am very close with everyone at Ceton at unfortunately there was many issues with the platform that was chosen and limited support for firmware corrections.  The bottom line is for live tv, the echo works great but don't expect much other than that.  I had a very early alpha/beta unit and finally just got rid of mine the other week as I have given up (as most people have).

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walshy002000

Thanks guys. Had read up on the issues but was hoping that MB transposing might have enabled it do deal with media in an echo-friendly format. Ive got no problem with my 360, but I've just got an Xbox one and I'm wanting to put my TV through it and don't really want to run two xboxes just to use WMC lol.

 

XBMC MB on a pi might be worth looking into soon, just hope it has the full format support giving the limited hardware decoding on it.

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JeremyFr79

Yeah I was one of those people that had high hopes for a single interface on all my tv's that I could watch my collection of movies and tv along with live tv. Unfortunately that didn't work out very well. I've moved back to Tivo instead of sticking with WMC for live TV and extenders.

That's kind of funny I went the exact opposite, I dropped my TiVo's for WMC and 360's, I figured why pay 50 bux a month (2 tivo's that I owned and a standard cable box from my provider)  So far I don't regret that decision one bit.  I had many issues with TiVo, I had 2 premieres and they seemed to get slower and slower as time went on, streaming shows from one to the other would result in the show coming to a stop with 5 minutes left with some cryptic message about the network (which has 0 issues) and having to restart the show from the very beginning and jump through 55 minutes of show to see how it ended, so on and so forth.  Anyways I'm rambling now.

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gcw07

That's kind of funny I went the exact opposite, I dropped my TiVo's for WMC and 360's, I figured why pay 50 bux a month (2 tivo's that I owned and a standard cable box from my provider)  So far I don't regret that decision one bit.  I had many issues with TiVo, I had 2 premieres and they seemed to get slower and slower as time went on, streaming shows from one to the other would result in the show coming to a stop with 5 minutes left with some cryptic message about the network (which has 0 issues) and having to restart the show from the very beginning and jump through 55 minutes of show to see how it ended, so on and so forth.  Anyways I'm rambling now.

Oh I agree with you on the Premiere. It is what made me leave Tivo after having every model up until then. The CPU inside it was just way too underpowered and made the entire experience horrible. However, the Roamio did fix that problem and I really couldn't be happier. Lifetime is the way to go for Tivo's if you don't mind keeping them for 2 years. I had my Tivo HD-XL for 5, so well worth the cost and still could probably get back another $150 selling it. With the new Tivo Mini's, I'd say it is what I wanted out of my WMC/Echo setup that I never got.

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