Since the Ceton Echo came out last November, there has been a lot of comparison and pricing justification to see if it is a better alternative than the Xbox360 or previous extenders. Through my experience with both in the last 4 months, I would like to give you my experience of the two from a consumer point of view. I myself already owned the Xbox 360 and it was O-K. I had a previous SageTV HD 200 extender and that was and still is the best extender I had ever used. My reasons for buying the Echo was to have a better user experience, to have a second extender and to have the possibility of Netflix and other streaming video apps in one device. Yes, their proposed future technology was an influence. If it worked well enough, I wanted to take my HTPC box, put it somewhere in the house that was out of sight and out of mind and have it all be ran by extenders. My set-up currently includes a gutted Acer computer sitting in an Nmedia box that has an AMD Athlon dual core 3.2 processor, 4 gigs DDR2 ram, Nvidia GT430, InfiniTV4 PCI, LG blu-ray/HD-DVD drive with a clean Windows 7 install 32 bit. Everything is wired directly to the LAN with CAT 5 or higher through a Verizon Fios Gigabite router using 50/25 gbps.

First off, my needs for a true media center extender involves TV tuner cards with DVR ability with the addition of being able to stream your movies, music, pictures and videos. Now, the reason that I wasn’t entirely satisfied with the Xbox-360 was that it can be a bit sluggish. It did not play main stream media such as VIDEO_TS, MKV’s and other similar containers.  It wouldn’t fast forward or rewind unless it is in a Windows Media format and I would have to pay $60 a year for a Live Gold membership so that I can watch YouTube, Netflix or VUDU on it.