Ceton extender beta shipping in Sept

[Skybolt]

Originally Posted by panteragstk

TBH that doesn't sound good. How can they launch the retail version in a month if it isn't even worth reviewing?

That and there are limited people testing, no where near the 1K as stated over at AVS, by the volume of post's in the beta forum, they are quite a bit short of a 100.

[panteragstk]

Originally Posted by Skybolt

That and there are limited people testing, no where near the 1K as stated over at AVS, by the volume of post's in the beta forum, they are quite a bit short of a 100.

They should really revise their launch date. With that few testing there is no way that thing is going to be ready. They are better off delaying until it's totally ready rather than releasing a beta product. That is a good way to kill of a product that has quite a bit of potential.

[Skybolt]

Originally Posted by panteragstk

They should really revise their launch date. With that few testing there is no way that thing is going to be ready. They are better off delaying until it's totally ready rather than releasing a beta product. That is a good way to kill of a product that has quite a bit of potential.

Yeah, some times things come up to speed quickly and others not so much. Right now it's a fight to meet the current spec. they released publicly. That said, 1 FW release and everything is fine. Only time will tell.

As a beta tester, we still don't know what hardware is being used. And to take the Echo apart would most surly cause some damage and void the warranty. So that still remains a mystery as we don't kno what the hardware is capable of either.

[panteragstk]

Originally Posted by Skybolt

Yeah, some times things come up to speed quickly and others not so much. Right now it's a fight to meet the current spec. they released publicly. That said, 1 FW release and everything is fine. Only time will tell.

As a beta tester, we still don't know what hardware is being used. And to take the Echo apart would most surly cause some damage and void the warranty. So that still remains a mystery as we don't kno what the hardware is capable of either.

I would guess it is either sigma or marvell based. Both should have similar capabilities. It could be something else of course.

[stanger89]

I thought Eric posted it's a Freescale SOC.

[wayner]

Originally Posted by Skybolt

As a beta tester, we still don't know what hardware is being used. And to take the Echo apart would most surly cause some damage and void the warranty. So that still remains a mystery as we don't kno what the hardware is capable of either.

Have you tried telnet'ing into the device and/or using something like Wireshark to monitor the network traffic?

I know it is a different beast but when you to telnet to a Sage extender it asks for a username - enter 'root' and you have access to the device without even needing a password.

Using Wireshark to watch the network traffic you may even see credentials being sent in plain text.

[Skybolt]

Originally Posted by stanger89

I thought Eric posted it's a Freescale SOC.

That was a while back on AVS, but was never confirmed to my knowlage. Also there are a few to choose from, is it the e600 dul core or the MPC8641 single core. And what graphics chip is used, hopefully a GPU? Whos knows is all I am saying.

1080p might not be possible on a single core arm with an embedded windows OS. JMO.

[Skybolt]

Originally Posted by wayner

Have you tried telnet'ing into the device and/or using something like Wireshark to monitor the network traffic?

I know it is a different beast but when you to telnet to a Sage extender it asks for a username - enter 'root' and you have access to the device without even needing a password.

Using Wireshark to watch the network traffic you may even see credentials being sent in plain text.

That's a good pont, I have not tried telnet or monitored the IP traffic. I had limited time this weekend, only a few hours on Sat.

I will try this tonight if I don't get bogged down with my new Colosus.

[wayner]

Presumably it would be the same network traffic and authentication as the Xbox360 or Linksys 2100/2200 extenders, would it not?

[Skybolt]

Originally Posted by wayner

Presumably it would be the same network traffic and authentication as the Xbox360 or Linksys 2100/2200 extenders, would it not?

I would, except the xbox is a proprietary OS of sorts and the embedded platform is more like your typical windows interface. So you don't know what was implemented. However it doesn't make sense to create many differant logon protocols, but hten we're talking about MS aren't we.

[stanger89]

Not really a point in this post, but man this has got to be the weirdest beta I've ever seen. There's no NDA (supposedly) but there's no info coming out in the AVS Forum thread, all the discussion for the last few pages has been about how to skip, what kind of skips are available, etc

[Biggen]

Funny, I posted something simliar to what you said over there this morning.

I have no idea what the size of Ceton is and how many programmers they have on staff but I would imagine it would be more than a few. I would also think they would be releasing firmware on a daily or semi-daily basis and also answering questions and giving feedback on the forums. Especially the AVS thread as that is the most visible.

Instead it is more of the same. Crickets...

[bcjenkins]

Why would they discuss at AVS instead of @ http://cetoncorp.com/forums/ ?

[Skybolt]

Originally Posted by stanger89

Not really a point in this post, but man this has got to be the weirdest beta I've ever seen. There's no NDA (supposedly) but there's no info coming out in the AVS Forum thread, all the discussion for the last few pages has been about how to skip, what kind of skips are available, etc

It's simple, and I agree with you, this IS the weirdest beta I've ever been a part of. The reason why you're hearing nothing is that the Echo at this point doesn't even do what hte Specs says. No 1080 anything at this point and I won't even mention where the audio is at.

Ceton asked for the beta testers "to be kind in what we say", and well, I guess everyone is honoring that. As I posted earlier, this is a true beta, one that IMO, shouldn't be publc but it is. So saying what the Echo can or can't do at this point is , well, pointless. This could develope into what everyone is hoping for, or not.

Having been part of many beta's, in house, at customer sites, I can say this can go in any direction. It just depends what Ceton's vision is. Do they want to be just another extender and maybe rival the xbox, or do they want to rival the HDx00 series of STB's?

Originally Posted by bcjenkins

Why would they discuss at AVS instead of @ http://cetoncorp.com/forums/ ?

As to AVS verse Ceton's forums, Ceton's forum's are only for the beta testers and only if you have actually received your Echo. So everyone discussing questons at AVS, hasn't received thier Echo yet, or is trying to decide if they want to order one when it is released. There really isn't any real big news to discuss about the Echo. Hopefully by ht e time it is released it will be more then what is advertised.

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by Biggen

Funny, I posted something simliar to what you said over there this morning.

I'd have posted there, but I've been kind of outspoken I think and I don't want to come across as nothing but a SageTV fanboy over there, I mean sure, I sort of am, but I was really hoping the Echo would be great. I think the silence sort of speaks for itself though and I don't think they need people piling on.

Originally Posted by bcjenkins

Why would they discuss at AVS instead of @ http://cetoncorp.com/forums/ ?

Because there's a lot of questions that were asked on AVS of both Ceton and those who got units so far. That, combined with the fact that there is no NDA, I would expect to see lots of reports like "I tried this xxx, and it didn't work, but Ceton is looking into it." or "I tried yyy and it worked great."

FWIW, from being a part of several SageTV betas I'm kind of stunned with what I'm seeing from this Ceton beta. With Sage, Jeff would give us the info, and a date, and they'd meet that date because they knew they were ready when they told us.

On top of that, being a Sage beta, 90%+ of the functionality was there, and they (wisely) put us under NDA for reasons I think Ceton is making apparent, even though IMO Sage didn't really need to with the quality of their betas. Sure there were bugs, but that's why it was a beta and we reported them, and Jeff and the gang looked into them and got back to us.

I mean when I got my first HD100, it supported 480i-1080p resolution selection, native resolution switching, pretty much everything the Sigma decoder could handle (VC1, H.264, MPEG2, DD, DTS passthrough).

Now admittedly I haven't received an Echo, and I (99%) won't be given what I'm reading, but it seems like night and day between Sage and Ceton betas, which is sad/unfortunate for Ceton, and rather shocking considering they had demo hardware running ten months ago.

[Skybolt]

Originally Posted by stanger89

... FWIW, from being a part of several SageTV betas I'm kind of stunned with what I'm seeing from this Ceton beta. With Sage, Jeff would give us the info, and a date, and they'd meet that date because they knew they were ready when they told us. ...

I would love to have seen this take place with this current beta. There is little information being given to the beta testers on there forums. We are completely in the dark, with an occasional, were looking into that - can you post a file, type of response. There are no dates promised, nothing stateing FW will be forth comming or anything. More then a little disapointing to say the least.

[stanger89]

Well, I suppose I should say they'd give us a date when they'd ship us the units, not string us along for 4 months until they ship. Actually even once we got the units I think there was already a date planned to go public (I think for the HD300 they'd actually already publicly announced it, we just got it sooner).

As far as bugs, they wouldn't give us dates, but they'd definitely interact with us through the debug process. And of course they'd tell us what formats it supported and generally give us all kinds of information that was useful.

[paulbeers]

I always thought (when the Ceton Q) was announced that it will be some kind of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde device. One "part" of it would be the WMC "extender" and the other would be the media playback (one side wouldn't necessarily know the other). I figured that is how they would get around the limitations of a "normal" Windows Media Center Extender, unfortunately that does not appear to be the case....

And again we Sage fans are wandering aimlessly hoping for the next SageTV...

[stanger89]

I wonder if that is exactly the case, that everything we hoped, that they led us to believe the Echo could do outside of MCX functionality was indeed dependent on the Q, and with the Q shelved, that functionality is dead.

[Skybolt]

There's no talk from Ceton about this, and the Echo is still strugeling to meet their release expectations. IMO.

I would have to agree that the Q was going to be thier add functionality. The hardware of the Echo seems like it can do alot more then it is right now. So you never know.