Ceton Q Replacement

[hennessy1]

I recently got a news letter update from ceton saying there ceton Q product will not be available this year as planned and possibly not available at all due to the microsoft media center changes for windows 8.

My question is will the HDHomeRun Prime with the dual tuners make a good replacement for what the Q would have been? and could I use that with the hdhomerun dual boxes as the ceton echo would be or does that system not work the same?

 

[TastesLikeChicken]

The HDHR Prime can provide some of the functionality that the Q would have although the 6 tuners of the Q vs. 3 of the HDHR Prime is no contest, and the Q had Blu-ray as well. You can use 2 Primes but that requires an extra cablecard which incurs an additional rental cost for most.

As far as the Echo, yes, it will work with the HDHR Prime since it is ultimately a Windows media extender. Unfortunately you won't get all of the nice little extras (like a web browser over an extender) and eye-candy that Ceton was promising by teaming up the Q and Echo.

 

[hennessy1]

I figured as much. Is there anything other than the hdhomerun like the Q that I should look into?

I am thinking right now the only good replacement is a ti vo but I didn't want to go that route.

 

[dagamer34]

If you plan on doing any serious amount of recording, I'd actually go for the Ceton InfiniTV 4. 4 tuners for only $199.

 

[hennessy1]

Only thing with that is I would need an available pc to always be on which I just don't have and wanted to avoid by going with the Q is there and other possibilty? If it came down to it I guess I would have too build one.

 

[A5]

Yeah, if the Q never comes out your other option would be to build you own HTPC (or order one from someone like AssassinHTPC, who runs the HTPC forum here).

 

[hennessy1]

Do you know or anyone know if it is possible to buy two of the infinitv cards in one pc and stream them to maybe their echo or another device as one? This way the user is no wiser to what is going on in the backround.

 

[LikeLinus]

Do you know or anyone know if it is possible to buy two of the infinitv cards in one pc and stream them to maybe their echo or another device as one? This way the user is no wiser to what is going on in the backround.

That's exactly what the Echo is meant to do. It utilizes the tuners from the InfiniTV 4 and it's just an extender. All the content is hosted from the Server/HTPC that has the Ceton cards.

 

[hennessy1]

Thank you for that. I contacted ceton as well and they said that you can combine up to 3 infinitv devices whether it be the usb or pcie version for a total of 12 tuners. Their driver makes it look as one device that has multiple tuners and just hands them out to an extender device such as the echo behind the scenes with no user interaction required.

 

[hennessy1]

More than welcome to move this question to the htpc forum. I know that usually a dvr has one hdd in it. Does anyone know if I would run into problems with a RAID 1 for a htpc dvr or would it be best to stick with a single drive config?