Review: Ceton InfiniTV 4 Quad CableCARD Tuner – Part I

[Mike Garcen]

[quote=”joao12345″]
[quote=”Mikinho”]
Sure but give me a few hours to respond.  My car broke down so I’m attempting to rebuild an alternator…
[/quote]

Also please exactly which other xbox is it you have? i see you have an xbox slim but is the other one an arcade or elite? how many gigs of storage?
I wanted to buy a plain vanilla xbox arcade which to my knowledge has almost no storage and little ram…
[/quote]

There should be absolutely 0 difference in Extender experience between any XBox 360, new or old, fyi. The benefit to the Slim is that it’s quieter and uses less power.

[mikinho]

I’ve got to disagree.  I tested on a Linksys DMA2200, Slim Xbox 360 and an original day-1 Xbox 360, all connected to the same gigabit network switch.

The Slim Xbox 360 offers the best experience and not only for the lower noise and power consumption.  Startup, Movie Library and Recorded TV respond noticeably faster.  The software between them is obviously identical so I attribute the improved experience to the network card.  I’m not willing to open up the Slim Xbox 360 to confirm so it is just an assumption that Microsoft have upgrade the network card.

I’ll see if I can get a confirmation on what hardware is being used, I’ve self-repaired my original Xbox 360 so I’ll open that up sometime to see what network card is used.

In terms of the Ceton InfiniTV 4, the experience is very similar on all three.  All of them handle Live TV and Recorded TV playback without.  In terms of channel changing speed and response time I’d order them Slim Xbox, Xbox and then the Linksys but the difference is very small.  You’ll noticed a bigger difference in the guide, mini guide and in the various libraries.

[jennyfur]

[quote=”joao12345″]how many gigs of storage?
I wanted to buy a plain vanilla xbox arcade which to my knowledge has almost no storage and little ram…
[/quote]
What do you need storage for? Unless you plan on doing some heavy gaming with the arcade, it’s unnecessary. My largest game save file is only 2.8gb, and I’d bet that could easily fit on any USB flash drive you have lying around the house. It may take a little longer to load things, but that’s the only downside I could see. My avatar is only like 8mb. Gamerpics are insignificant in size, and I doubt you’d be on the dashboard enough to warrant downloading extra themes or videos or whatever.

I don’t believe the amount of ram has changed at all. They just switched to a smaller process for everything (45nm I believe) and integrated the CPU, GPU, and eDRAM onto a single chip to make it more efficient and less hot.

[Mike Garcen]

hrmmm…..didn’t even consider a change of NIC…sounds like a review/blog topic worthy of all that free time 😛 very cool though, good to know yet another reason to upgrade

[Anonymous]

Any ETA on Part 2 and Part 3? I know you are busy but I can speak for over 50% of the followers of this guide that we are desperate. Something to look forward to besides regular season football.

[mikinho]

Part 2 will be published on Wednesday at noon CT.  It will now include some information on dual InfiniTV4 in several of the setups.  Part 3 I don’t know yet, this weekend didn’t get as expected.

[Anonymous]

I thought the only difference between an arcade & say a pro was that the pro came bundled with a hard drive out of the box.  But that was the only difference between any of them.  And since you can add a drive after an arcade could be made a “pro”.

Correct?

[joao12345]

Its great to know the bare bones xbox arcade works perfectly for watching live tv.

One last question the Xbox can play MKV files right????

[mikinho]

[quote=”hpservertech”]
I thought the only difference between an arcade & say a pro was that the pro came bundled with a hard drive out of the box.  But that was the only difference between any of them.  And since you can add a drive after an arcade could be made a “pro”.

Correct?
[/quote]

It depends on the hardware revision you are looking at.  The Jasper hardware revision introduced Arcade units with 512MB internal memory on them.

[mikinho]

[quote=”joao12345″]
Its great to know the bare bones xbox arcade works perfectly for watching live tv.

One last question the Xbox can play MKV files right????
[/quote]

Not natively but you can add support via 1- a DirectShow MKV splitter such as Haali Media Splitter or MPC-HC standalone filters, or 2- a MediaFoundation MKV splitter, currently limited to DivX.

[joao12345]

[quote=”Mikinho”]
[quote=”joao12345″]
Its great to know the bare bones xbox arcade works perfectly for watching live tv.

One last question the Xbox can play MKV files right????
[/quote]

Not natively but you can add support via 1- a DirectShow MKV splitter such as Haali Media Splitter or MPC-HC standalone filters, or 2- a MediaFoundation MKV splitter, currently limited to DivX.
[/quote]

Does anyone know where i can find a reliable tutorial on how to add MKV support to the xbox?

[mikinho]

Honestly, there isn’t much to it.  I’d start with installing Haali Media Splitter via [url=http://haali.su/mkv/]http://haali.su/mkv/[/url].  A new version was released yesterday.  Install with all the default settings and you should be good to go. 

If you need multiple audio andor subtitle support that gets trickier.  If you need help with that please create a new thread on our forums and I’ll be happy to step you through your different options, you have a few and none of them are perfect.

[joao12345]

Oh I installed this on my HTPC to play MKV files through MCE…now i get it whatever files my PC’s MCE can play the xbox can play? I dont have an xbox so i am really not familiar with its features.

Completely unrelated topic: A friend from work says he has his xbox in the garage and his master bedroom is on top of the garage he says he has a 35foot HDMI from xbox to his tv in his bedroom and he controls it with the normal out of the box control…is he lying?

[mikinho]

[quote=”joao12345″]
Oh I installed this on my HTPC to play MKV files through MCE…now i get it whatever files my PC’s MCE can play the xbox can play? I dont have an xbox so i am really not familiar with its features.
[/quote]

Any standalone media file that has a corresponding DirectShow or Media Foundation decoder can be transcoded to play on Media Center Extenders.  This is only true in Windows 7 Media Center, in Vista Media Center the transcoding framework did not exist.

[quote=”joao12345″]
Completely unrelated topic: A friend from work says he has his xbox in the garage and his master bedroom is on top of the garage he says he has a 35foot HDMI from xbox to his tv in his bedroom and he controls it with the normal out of the box control…is he lying?
[/quote]

If he means the Xbox controller, then no he is not lying.  The Xbox controller uses 2.4GHz wireless technology with 30-foot range.

[Meester.Rip]

That fact that you can’t sync the xbox controller to one single xbox is annoying. Everytime I turn the xbox on upstairs the one downstairs turns on. Although i think that is the only command that does it, it is till annoying.

[Author]

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